Death Is My Dancing Partner

To Chula

One

The Dancer and the Man

Crouched within the slanting diagonal shadow that bisected the temple doorway like a dark blue guillotine-blade, she stood waiting her turn to go down the steps and perform. She was Mari, and she did the Dance of Death. No one else could do it. No one else would do it, dreading what might befall. They had started training her for it when she was nine, and she was nineteen now.

Every once in a while she would edge forward a little and peer down. Not at the other girls posturing weirdly in stylized dance there on the platform midway down the steps. She’d seen them do it a thousand times. Not at the little group of cruise-ship passengers standing below in the courtyard. She’d seen groups like that dozens of times. Just at him.

She couldn’t take her eyes off him. She’d seen him when he came in with the others, and they dutifully took off their shoes just before the entrance, as custom prescribed. First she’d just glanced at him. Then her look came back, and back, and back, and stayed longer each time.

Her heart seemed to grow softer and warmer. She’d never been in love. She wondered if this was it now, the beginning of it. If it was, how quickly it began! Just with one look. Could it begin that quickly, she wondered? They didn’t teach you that at the temple. They taught you everything else, but they didn’t teach you about that. You had to find out for yourself.

He saw her now. She had looked once too often. He raised his head, and looked up at her, and their eyes met. She ventured a little smile, hoping he could see it all that distance away. And then he smiled back. And oh, his smile was like sunrise on the water. Then she drew her head back out of sight, so that nobody else would notice or would see.

First love. All her life in a temple, with only girls around her, and yet it had come to her and found her out.

She beckoned backhand without turning her head, and one of a little group of aging women standing at the other end of the passage — former dancers themselves and now more or less servants — came forward.

“Yes, my pearl?”

“More shadowing for my brows.”

The old woman produced a thin sliver of charcoal, reached upward with it.

The girl took it away from her. “I will do it myself. Now give me one of those papers I have sometimes seen you roll and smoke.”

A look of consternation appeared on the wizened face.

“Don’t deny it. I have seen you do it when you thought no one was watching.”

The old woman fumbled reluctantly, handed her something. “But if someone should see you—”

“I am not going to smoke it.” The girl motioned her off. “Now go back. I have to go down there soon.”

She waited until the figure had receded, then turning so that her back covered what she did, held the flimsy little leaf of rice paper flat against the wall and with the charcoal-stick painfully printed four words. Not in the native characters, in the English alphabet.

COME BACK LATER ALONE

Then, as though regretting what she had just done, or changing her mind, she crumpled it into a tiny pellet and held it hidden in her hand.

The dance suddenly came to an end, and the temple girls filed up the steps, between the priests who had formed a background to the performance, and disappeared within the gloomy edifice single file.

In the silence that followed for a moment or two, one of the onlookers turned and began to address the other members of the party. He raised his voice a little, so that they might all be sure to hear him, and she could distinguish every word clearly up there where she waited. She had heard the same thing many times before. He was a cruise-director or guide, and every party that came here whenever a ship touched the island was accompanied by one of them.

“I’ve persuaded them to show us something that’s very rarely allowed to be seen. It’s a symbolic death dance, in honor of Kali the Destroyer, goddess of death. I may as well warn you ahead of time this dance has a very unpleasant reputation. There’s a superstition that it will bring Kali down among the onlookers if it is performed too often. In other words, cause death to strike somewhere in its immediate vicinity. If you look around you’ll notice the natives all keep their eyes tightly closed while its gong on, even the drum-beaters. And yet, to turn their backs or try to leave would be sacrilegious, they’d be afraid to risk it. It’s danced by an individual performer taking two parts. If you follow closely, you’ll be able to get the symbolism. She’s Kali, in the form of a cobra, and also Kali’s victim, whom the goddess destroys at the end of the dance, and who falls headlong down the steps.”

The drums started to pulse again as he stopped speaking, but there was an ominous funereal depth to them now that they had lacked before. The old woman tiptoed up behind her and threw a finespun grayish veil over her head and shoulders, then quickly retreated again.

The girl came into view, started down the steps with static slowness. First her body was held rigid, then little by little her wrists began to flicker, then they began to dart singly in and out of the folds of the veil. Then at last her arms rose, like a cobra rearing for its strike, and began twining serpentinely above her head.

The veil was suddenly cast back, and a ripple of tension surged outward into the air from the gesture, like an explosion of terror. Her figure was scarcely moving meanwhile. Only the wrists continued to lick sluggishly just over the top of her head, with the horrible suggestiveness of a questing, down-hanging snake.

Something stirred in the still air overhead. A buzzard alighted on one of the temple’s grotesque gables. A second skimmed winglessly about for a moment, finally came down to join the first. Their necks were sickeningly craned downward into the compound below, as if eying what was taking place in it with a sort of loathsome intelligence of their own. Buzzards, the carrion birds of death.

The sinuousness had crept downward from her wrists now to the arms and shoulders and torso. Her waist rotated in horrid realistic simulation of a snake’s coils. Suddenly she leaped lightly across to face the other way, took up the pantomime of the death-victim, helpless, unable to escape, shivering from head to foot in one continuous ripple. Then as the beat of the drums quickened to a crescendo, the cobra finally lashed out in fury and struck.

There was a complete pause, a sudden stoppage of all motion. Her limbs froze momentarily into the last random attitude they had been overtaken in. It was the knowledge of death entering: the venom was in now, it was too late, there was no escaping death any more.

Slowly, motion set in again. Convulsive spasms coursed down her body, almost seeming to swell it each time with their passage. She arched upward, then toppled headfirst down the stone steps, one bent arm protecting her face.

Silence came down like a mallet on the skull, as the last drumbeat winged off. She lay there exhausted but unhurt. With one eyelid slightly open she saw him bend over and reach down to the ground for a minute, touch something lying directly in front of his feet. When he had straightened up again, the little paper pellet she had rolled there was gone. She saw him give a sidelong look to see if anyone else was watching.

Priests and attendants lifted her up just as she lay and carried her bodily up the steps, feet first and head down. She maintained the inert position she had fallen into. The shadowy blade darkening the doorway sliced downward, and she was gone from view.

There was a sudden commotion from the natives who had been huddled at the foot of the steps, apart from the sightseeing party. They had all risen now except one. He remained humped-over limply, face to ground. They formed a jabbering circle around him. One of them touched him tentatively with his toe, and his lumped body promptly fell over sidewise and straightened out, lifeless. They hurriedly lifted him and carried him off somewhere, around the side of the building.

The courtyard cleared itself as if by magic. The crowd melted away, casting terrified looks over their shoulders. Even the whites looked highly nervous. Overhead the buzzards ruffled their plumage impatiently, as if anxious to dip down and begin their work under cover of the concealing darkness that was fast approaching.

The moon rose early, for it was the period of its full. As its light yellowed the temple roof-tiles and seemed to sprinkle the courtyard with powdered sulphur, the old woman and she came stealing furtively down the steps together, both their figures shrouded from head to foot.

“But if it is found out, I am the one who will be punished.”

“Quiet. Were you never young at all yourself?”

“But I never did this!”

“Then I feel sorry for you. Not to love once is not to live at all.”

The old woman fumbled with the wooden crossbar securing the courtyard gate. “I cannot get it open unaided.”

“Then I will help you. You raise it from that end, I will raise it from this.” Between them they set it down on the ground, careful not to make noise. The girl tugged at the heavy wooden barrier and it began to turn inward, creaking and cracking. She stopped moving it when there was just enough space to squeeze out through. “Now wait here by it, lest somebody come along and close it, so that I cannot get back in again.”

“Ai,” whined the old woman, turning her face upward. “Why did he have to come here this day? Why did the moon have to rise this night?”

“Old coward,” mocked the girl, but almost tenderly, and slipped outside alone. “I’m not afraid of love, even if you are.”

A cigarette hopped to the ground like a red firefly, and he stepped out from under the shadow of a tree where he had been waiting. She ran to him, short as the distance was — even that early in their game. Then stood there breathlessly, looking up at him.

“Hello,” he said finally.

“Hello,” she whispered.

“I wasn’t sure if you meant it or not, but I had to find out.”

“Everything in love, I mean.”

“Hey,” he marvelled. “You talk English. I wasn’t even sure you would.”

She shrugged. “I’m what they call a European here, although I’ve never seen Europe, I was born here on the island. Both my parents were full-blooded Dutch. This used to be a Dutch colony, before it became independent. My father was a plantation owner. Then the Japanese came, and my mother disappeared. After the war, he couldn’t look after me any more, so he turned me over to the temple.” She saw the look he gave her. “It’s not immoral, you know. It’s more like a school, a religious school. They feed us and take care of us, and train us for dancing. We’re not—” She dropped her eyes for a moment, “—like what you think.”

“That dance,” he said.

She smiled deprecatingly. “You weren’t inside afterward, or you would have seen him pick himself up and dust himself off, and accept a few coins from the priests for his helpfulness.”

“And you,” he said emphatically, “weren’t outside the gate afterward when we were all leaving. One of the others, somebody entirely different, keeled over in his tracks then and there. And he was dead.”

She shrugged slightly. “If you believe, you believe. If you don’t, you don’t.”

“Do you?”

“I’d rather talk about — you and me. Every night of my life, I have the dance. Tonight, I have — you.”

“What do they call you?”

“Mari.”

“That’s not a very strange name. It’s almost like Mary. Only the way you say it comes out Mah-ri.”

“It is Mary. Maria is my name. Dutch for Mary. Only here they call me Mari. And what do they call you?”

“Maxwell Jones. I’m the ship’s ork leader.”

She looked blank.

“Band leader,” he translated. “You know what a band is, don’t you?”

“Musicians.”

“Maxie Jones, King of the Saxophones. That’s the trade-tag. You know what a saxophone is, don’t you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It goes down like this. And it’s got keys running down it.”

“To keep it locked up when you’re not using it.”

He laughed. “I bet you don’t even know what a telephone is.”

“That I do know. I’ve never used one, because they have them here. But I know what they are.”

“Gee,” he burst out animatedly, “I’d like to take you around with me, show you the sights. All the things you’ve never seen before. TV sets and refrigerators and evening gowns. What kicks for you — and what kicks for me. Think what a place like Paris would do to you. And when it comes right down to it, think what you would do to Paris.”

She moved in closer, until a piece of tissue paper would have had a hard time getting down past their lips. “Take me with you. Show me Paris, show me London, show me New York. But above all, show me love.”

“In just that order?”

“Show me saxophones and telephones. But above all show me love.”

He grimaced quizzically. “That keeps getting in there, doesn’t it?”

“Don’t you like love?”

“I love it. But it’s like flypaper. You touch it once, with just the tip of your pinky, and after that the whole thing comes with you wherever you go.”

“What is flypaper?”

“For that matter, what is love?” He put two fingers to her chin. “Why’d you fall for me like this, anyway?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why me? There were better-looking fellows in that crowd.”

“Not to me.”

“There were taller fellows in that crowd.”

“Not to me.”

“There were smarter fellows in that crowd.”

“I don’t want you smart. I just want you the way you are.”

“I should’ve quit while I was ahead,” he said dourly. “Take me with you.”

“Better not ask me that again or I will; You’re not so hard to take with, you know.”

“If they find out I did this, they make me stay out altogether. Then I starve. Then you have to take me with you anyway.”

He grinned. “Then why did you do it?”

“I ask my heart, and she don’t answer.”

“Let’s move around a little,” he suggested. “I don’t like to stay so close to this place.”

He put his arm around her waist, and she leaned her head against his shoulder, and they strolled along like that, in and out of drippings of moonglow that ran down their backs like tiger stripes as they moved along.

He squinted upward. “Boy, that moon!”

“Is it bad or is it good?”

“Good for you. Bad for me. It’s making me do things I hadn’t orter wanter do. Like this.” He held her. “And this.” He kissed her.

After a few of them, he asked her, “Have you ever been kissed before?”

“Not by a man. Have you?”

“Not by a temple-dancer. So we start out both even. But watch me on the curves, honey. It’s a shame to do this to you.”

“What curves?”

“Dangerous curves ahead.”

“I go around them with you.”

“I’m in a Jaguar and you’re in a jalopy.”

She shivered suddenly and turned to look back.

“What’s the matter?” he asked her.

“Don’t you hear?”

This time he heard it, and it wasn’t reassuring. There was a sudden commotion at the partly-open gate. The old woman gave a whimpering cry of anguish. A man shouted something hoarsely. Answering shouts came back. Bare feet pattered across courtyard flagstones. Some sort of an alarm-gong started to throb out. Lights winked here and there. The whole temple came alive like an angry beehive.

“Let’s take five,” said Jones hastily, “or for that matter, fifteen or fifty.” They started running, his arm still around her waist.

“I left a ricksha back here someplace on the road,” he panted.

They found it, the driver squatting on the ground smoking a cigarette. Jones rammed a hand into his pocket waved money in front of his face. “Fifty of this-whatever it is — if you can make town ahead of the Klu Klux back there!” he promised him.

Once in, their pace — misleadingly — seemed painfully slow. Actually, they were flying along, every bump and jar a long arc in the air aboveground.

“I left my piano player at a Portuguese bar,” Jones chattered, trying to keep his teeth from getting knocked out.

She translated for him to their human eight-cylinder.

Behind them the commotion was dwindling, meaning they were outdistancing it. But this was only a temporary advantage; they were bound to catch up sooner or later, if only because they knew which direction was the only one the fugitives could take.

They made town and came flying down the “main street,” finely powdered dust streaming out from beneath the wheels like spray from a pair of outboard motors.

A figure was prancing around in mid-roadway, in the oblong of tawny light cast outside by the open bardoorway.

“That’s him, that’s Fingers,” Jones told her unnecessarily.

The ricksha came to a sudden halt, and they nearly went sailing out through the front of it, over the driver’s bent back and all.

“Good work,” said Fingers caustically. “What’d you do, wake up the whole works? Punch a time-clock leaving the temple?”

He had with him a lady of the town, whom he’d picked up while waiting. She had on a hat whose brim was about the size of a bicycle wheel, supporting a whole flower-garden. She was a little bit Portuguese, a little bit native, a little dash of this, a little dash of that. A fruit salad of a lady. But a fruit salad left standing out of the refrigerator a little too long. She even spoke a rusted sort of English, probably scraped off the hulls of ships.

“Hurry up, get in!” Jones ordered Fingers. “They’ll be down on us any minute!”

“Three of us in that? Too much weight for him to pull. We’ll never make the launch. He’s busting a gasket right now, as it is! I’ve got a better idea. Get out, both of you! Hurry up, get out!”

Jones vaulted out, lifted Mari down bodily.

“Now gimme that wrap she’s got around her, quick!” Fingers barked. “Peel, lady, peel like you were on a run way!” He turned to the lady of the town. “You want to make ten dollars?”

“For ten dolla you can troway calendar, you got me booked for rest of season,” was the business-like answer. “Here. Now gimme that hat. Wrap yourself up in this all over. Cover your head too. Now get in that thing and get going. All over town. Double back and go upcountry again, if you have the chance.” He snatched his own hat off his head, perched it on her shoulder. “Keep this on there, and sit low in the ricky, they won’t know the difference.”

The ricksha scooted off again. Fingers slammed the flower-garden hat down over Mari. It flopped almost to her shoulders. The three of them dove inside the bar.

A minute or two later, when angry inquiring faces stopped to peer in from the doorway, the Portuguese barman’s midget radio was plinking away and Fingers was dancing lazily with a droopy lady of the town, who held a beer-bottle loosely in one hand.

Somebody spat over the threshold with projectile-like violence, to show what they thought of such associations Unclean! Daughter of the devil who walks the streets all night seeking money.

“Never heard of cuspidors, I guess,” Fingers observed, but careful to keep his voice down.

The faces withdrew and resumed their pursuit down the street.

“All right, end of set,” said Fingers, releasing her. He gave a low whistle, and Jones came out of a door at the back, behind which he’d been lurking. “What this place needs,” he complained, “is a new John.”

Fingers had been casing the street from the doorway. All clear, he reported. “Let’s go. They must have gone back up the other way again, like I was hoping they would.”

The way to the waterfront lay unobstructed. When they had reached it they helped her down into the little tender waiting to take them back to the cruise ship, whose lights blinked and winked peacefully at them from tar out in the open roadstead.

Sitting in it, coursing across the starlit water, Fingers asked all at once, “Now that you’ve got her, what’re you going to do with her?”

“Make my band the top name band in the country,” Jones answered confidently, “with that dance she does.”

Fingers gave him a long long look. A look with a price tag on it. A reduced-value price tag. “So that’s all it is,” he said. “The band. And what about the kid herself?”

“That’s all it ever is, the band,” Jones answered. “That’s all it ever will be, the band. First, last, and always. I warned her, back there. I warned her. I told her how it would be. If she wants to take her chances...”

She nestled happily against Jones, snuggled her head upon his shoulder. Then suddenly turned her face upward and gave him a fervent kiss on the cheek. A kiss he didn’t return.

“I can just see her now, doing that specialty, with my music to back her up—”

Fingers murmured something half-audibly.

She turned to him suddenly. “What’s a heel? Why did you say that just then?”

“I’m afraid, honey,” he told her almost sadly, “it’s something you’re going to learn a lot about in the next year or two. Something you’re going to have a lot of experience with.”

J. Mortimer Rubin, the agent, was busy at his desk, doing nothing, when a call came through about two-thirty that Friday afternoon.

Goldie, his switchboard girl, said over the phone, “Maxie Jones is on the line.”

J. Mortimer winced. “Oh, they’re back? Now my troubles start in again.” But he said it with an indulgent grin on his face.

He leaned back at a calisthenic angle. He put one leg up along the side of his desk. He lit a cigar. He always lit a cigar when speaking on the phone; it helped him to talk better. (“You should cut down,” his doctor had warned him. “Then have the phone taken out,” he had shrugged.)

“How was the trip? How’s the bunch?” he said affably, on a single breath.

Then, “So where are you?” Then, “It hadda be that hotel? It couldn’t be anything plainer? So who’s paying for it?” Then, in answer to the answer, he commented wryly, “I figured I was.”

His cigar did an about-face in his mouth, rolled over to the other side.

I got some money waiting for you here. When you coming up I should turn it over to you?

“You’re rehearsing?” J. Mortimer became paternal. “Fine. That I like to hear. Too much rehearsing wouldn’t wear out any band.”

A deluge of enthusiasm now seemed to pour out — or rather, in to his ear. He didn’t have a chance to say anything for some moments, though he made several restless shifts about in his chair.

Finally he was given an opening; presumably Maxwell Jones had to breathe now and then.

“A dancer you brought with you? You hadda go shopping? They come out from between the stones here, and you hadda bring one more back with you! Why didn’t you bring something that’s scarce, like, like—” He couldn’t for a moment think of anything that was scarce.

“I wouldn’t believe it when I see her? So then why should I go all the way down there and watch her, if I wouldn’t believe it when I see her? Better I should stay here, take it easy, and not believe it from where I am already, without moving.”

Hectic protestations followed. He finally capitulated.

“All right, Maxie, all right. I was going to the bobber-shop anyway, so I’ll go to the bobbershop the long way around and stop in by you on the way. Where you rehearsing? Ryan Hall, the third floor.

“And listen, Maxie, not too loud. Good, but not too loud. I get headaches from band rehearsals, you know that already.”

He hung up. He put out his cigar, the conversation now being over. He put on his hat, and no one could wear his hat as jauntily as J. Mortimer Rubin. Finally he looked in his desk drawer for something which he failed to find. He went outside to Goldie.

“You got some aspirin?” he said. “Maxwell Jones is back.”

She apparently liked them too. “That bunch of wild Indians,” she commiserated good-naturedly. She handed him the aspirin.

“It ain’t that they play bad,” he explained, “its just that they play so loud.”

“I know,” she admitted wistfully, “I kind of like Viennese waltzes myself.”

He paused at the door. “Make a memo I should call up that fellow that runs that place in Perth Amboy.”

“Should I call him for you right now, Mr. Rubin?”

He pursed his lip, he fingered it. “Maybe I better listen to them first before you call up anybody. They got some dancer they brought back with them. Even in Perth Amboy I can’t afford to make enemies.”

Though the distance was not insuperable, he took a taxi. This was more a matter of professional prestige than of aversion to exertion. No matter where he was going, an agent should arrive in a taxi, he felt.

He handed the driver a ten per cent tip when he alighted. This had nothing whatever to do with economy, but it was hard to convince most drivers that this was the case.

The present one looked at it a moment longer than was strictly necessary. “Well, thanks!” he exclaimed, somewhat less than appreciatively.

“Listen,” said J. Mortimer firmly, “when I get more than ten per cent, so will you.”

Ryan Hall was a tall, thin, and rather elderly building, overlooking a small, treeless, block-square park, more frequented by pigeons and derelicts than anyone else the park, that is to say — because of its cramped situation in the very heart of the bustling city. The building had been used from time immemorial for any and all kinds of theatrical rehearsals.

Even on the street outside a blurred conglomeration of sounds could be heard issuing from its windows: the hailstone-like patter of choral tap-dancing coming from the second floor, with a tinny piano to keep the beat; a soprano soloist practising a popular song somewhere on the fourth. But loudest of all was the brassy oompah swelling from the third-floor windows, and drowning everything else out intermittently, when it was really going strong.

J. Mortimer knew the various attaches of the building. Eddie, the elevator boy; Sam, the man behind the cigar and newspaper concession in the foyer. And above all, Luke, the colored shoeshine man, who had his two platformed chairs there on one side of the entry. He said, “Hello, Sam, hello, Eddie.” Luke he pressed fondly on the shoulder for a moment in passing. “Come on up to the third-floor rehearsal room in a few minutes, Luke. You should give me a shine while I’m listening.”

Luke beamed. J. Mortimer never had change when you gave him a shine. Though you could hear it jingle in all his pockets all over him, he never could seem to find anything less than a dollar. Then he never would take anything back from it. “All right, you owe me one next time, was his standard evasion. Next time never came.”

The difference, probably, was that in this case, unlike the taxi drivers, Luke was his own entrepreneur, there was no commission involved, he was his own business.

The blare was terrific as he stepped out of the elevator and pushed open the hinged doors of the rehearsal hall. He winced for a minute. As he had often remarked, it wasn’t his kind of music. “I sell it, but enjoy it I don’t have to.”

It broke up at first sight of him. They came pouring down from the stand, almost throwing their instruments away in their haste to get over to him. With the exception of the piano, of course, which was abandoned where and as it stood. Even Bee Bradley, the singer, threw up (not down) the arrangement she had been studying to herself while walking back and forth along the row of windows, so that it disintegrated into several loose sheets as it came down on the floor.

A second feminine figure — “Her,” he said to himself with misgivings — remained seated unobtrusively on a straight-backed chair against the wall, knees tight together and hands demurely clasping them. He had no time to take further note of her just then; pandemonium had broken all around him.

“Morty!”

“Baby!”

“Hel-lo, Pop-pa!”

“I could kiss you!”

This from one of the males. But Bee, in fact, did — energetically and several times in succession, with a vocal accompaniment. “Yum! Yum! Yum! You old sweetheart. Did you miss us?”

“That you could count on,” he said owlishly. “It was so quiet around here. Ask Goldie. I didn’t know my own office.”

They roared delightedly.

“Did you get my postcard from Marseille?” Bee chirped. “I sent you a postcard from Marseille. Ooh, that Marseille!”

He nodded rebukingly. “You hurt yourself. One postcard the whole trip.”

“I was going to send you one from— What was that other place?” she protested ear-splittingly. “We couldn’t find any. The only kind they had was that dirty kind. I couldn’t send one of them to you.”

He pinched her derisively on the chin. “Never mind. I know you. You’re a good little schnorrer.”

Jones was beckoning to the forlorn-looking girl in the background. “Come on, honey. Come on over here a minute.”

She got up and came toward them a little timidly.

Jones put his arm about her waist to encourage her.

An extremely noncommittal look made its appearance on J. Mortimer’s face for a moment.

“She speaks English?” he said dubiously to Jones.

“Oh, sure. She just grew up out there. She was like educated in one of their temples. Regular lessons and all. They raised her in one of their temples.”

J. Mortimer was still extremely dubious. “She comes from a temple? You didn’t tell me this before.”

“I was going to,” Jones temporized. Then he rushed on. “But the way they taught her to dance! You should see the way they taught her to dance!”

“In temples they dance?” J. Mortimer was completely nonplussed. “My rabbi, Dr. Meyer, should hear about this.”

“It’s not your kind of a temple, Morty,” one of the others hurriedly interposed. “It’s more like a boarding-school. They got a different kind of religion from yours.”

“That I wouldn’t argue,” said J. Mortimer with conviction, eying her from head to foot.

“Say hello to Morty, honey,” Jones said encouragingly. “We call her Mari for short. Her legal name is Gertrud Maria Ruyter. What can you do with that for a dancer? She’s hundred per cent Dutch, you know. Her father turned her over to the temple to rear for him, after her mother died. He... er, hung around down on the beach a good deal, if you get what I mean. Go on, say hello to Mr. Rubin, honey.”

“Hello to Mr. Rubin honey,” she said.

“We’re married to her,” somebody spoke up impishly. “We’re not working at it,” Jones quickly protested. “Just a business arrangement. She wouldn’t have been allowed to land otherwise. She shared Bee’s cabin on the ship, and I bunked up with Fingers and Bradley.” He turned to her for corroboration. “Right, honey? You tell him.”

“Right,” she said wistfully.

J. Mortimer shook his head. “A fine kind of marriage. Go ahead, it’s your own funeral.”

“Bring over a chair for Mort,” ordered Jones, all business. “I want him to catch this.”

“Catch?” said Rubin, as though he didn’t like the word. He seated himself somewhat gingerly. He took off his glasses, he polished them, he put them on again. He focussed. “So?” he said.

“Places,” snapped Jones. “Get out of the way, Bee. Go over by the window.”

“Pardon me for living.” She perched herself on the sill.

“I’ll give you the script,” continued Jones. “So you’ll understand what she’s trying to do. Now, it’s a death dance. She takes two parts—”

“Before and after,” came softly from the windowsill.

“Bee,” rasped Jones severely. “Take her out of here, Brad. Keep her in the hall. Now, as I was saying, Mort. You got to imagine a snake.”

“I should imagine a snake?” said Rubin uneasily, with the look of a man who is trying to keep an open mind.

“She’s struggling with it. First she’s the snake, then herself. The snakes bites her.”

“I-f-f-ff,” shuddered Rubin involuntarily.

“She falls down, and she dies. That’s the story of the dance.”

Rubin gave the impression of someone who has been left behind some time ago. He picked his way dutifully along. “First she’s a snake, then she ain’t. When she ain’t, the snake bites her. She falls down and—” He got stuck. “She falls down or the snake falls down?”

“She falls down, and dies.”

Rubin gave it a capsule criticism then and there. “Who done this?” he demanded almost indignantly, as though of a mind to lodge a complaint with ASCAP at the first opportunity.

“It’s ages old. It’s a ritual, like,” said the knowledgeable Jones. “It came down from history.”

“It should have stayed there,” snapped Rubin. He turned his head sharply aside and wiped off his mouth. “Phooey,” he said. “After a heavy dinner, yet, you should show this to people.”

Jones’ expression was a little death in itself.

“All right, all right,” Rubin relented brusquely. “Show me. Show me. I’ll watch.”

“Number One on the books, boys!” cried out Jones triumphantly.

The door opened and closed and Luke edged up to Rubin diffidently, shoeshine box in hand. “You want your shine now, Mr. Rubin?”

“Absolutely,” said Rubin, almost with relief. “It may keep my mind busy, sitting here.” He meticulously adjusted his trouser-legs. “Look, Luke,” he cautioned him indulgently, “I got white socks on, yes? Try you shouldn’t get streaks on them from the polish over the top of the shoes. Keep it down below.”

“I’ll be careful, Mr. Rubin,” Luke promised.

(“I’m watching, I’m watching,” said Rubin parenthetically to Jones, in answer to a hurt look. “She’s the snake now, right?” He corrected himself. “No, she’s the other one.”)

Luke, buffering away, turned his head curiously for a moment.

“Better you should look at my shoes than what I got to look at,” his patron commented sotto voce. “You ain’t missing nothing.”

“Very interesting,” he declared more publicly, more out of kindness of heart, perhaps, than any actual enthusiasm. “Very good, dolling. You dung that very good. Like Gilda Gray years ago it reminds me, only even looser.”

Something attracted his attention below.

“Luke, my socks. You’re getting streaks from your cloth. How can you see if you’re leaning your face so close, against my knees?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Rubin,” Luke said faintly, trying to draw back to an upright position on his knees. His eyes rolled in his head.

“Luke!” Rubin cried sharply. “You don’t feel well? What’s the matter? You want to rest a minute, son?” Luke tried to plant a fresh dab of polish on one of the toecaps, missed it entirely, and his hand landed on the floor offside. A moment later his body went over after it, stayed doubled for a moment, face down, then slowly straightened out and went limp.

Rubin jumped up, stepped over him to give himself room, bent down and tried to raise his head and shoulders.

“Luke! Luke!” He shook him, patted him frantically on the cheeks.

Behind him, on the floor, Jones’ dancer lay equally flat and equally motionless. Or almost so, but not quite, for her eyes still blinked as she stared upward at them. Luke’s didn’t any more.

“Scots whiskey!” commanded Rubin frightenedly. “Stop with those drums, I’m trying to hear his heart. Bring another chair, put it next here. Help me stretch him out on them. Look out with his shoe polish, you’re kicking it.”

Whiskey, whether Scotch or not, was produced with back-pocket immediacy, poured between Luke’s statically parted lips.

“It don’t stay in,” Rubin breathed, hoarsely fearful.

They stopped that. Somebody wiped at the side of his neck, where it had run down.

“Call an ambulance,” Rubin urged. “Can’t you see he needs help?”

Somebody already had. Brad came back from the hall.

It took a little while. As it always does with those things. A little while that seemed a long while. They all stood around him, looking at him helplessly. All but just one of them.

The girl. She had picked herself up long ago, unhelped, unnoticed. She stood the width of the room away from all of them. Cowering back against the wall, hands defensively pushed behind her, as though they’d been guilty of something and were trying to hide. No one remembered her, no one looked at her.

Finally the harrowing moan in the street got there, broke off short with a crash of silence. An interne and a pair of stretcher-bearers came in.

“You should have left him on the floor,” he rebuked, before he’d even got past the door. “Never move anyone.”

It only took him a moment once he’d reached the recumbent form. He straightened up again.

“Nothing to be done,” he said. “He’s dead.”

No one said anything. No one at all. What is there to say? What can be added, once death has had the last word?

They looked at him, and they thought about him, each one privately, by himself. Then they looked away, but they still thought about him, each one privately, by himself. One looked out the window. One at his saxophone as he turned it over speculatively in his hands. One at a safely barren part of the floor where there was nothing but floor. One at a pari-mutuel racing ticket, though he’d seen it before and knew it by heart. One — Rubin — down at his black-streaked white socks. Almost fondly, as though he prized them now.

Then he was gone, they’d taken him out. All but a little bottle of black shoe polish. That stayed there. Finally Rubin picked it up, and he tore one sheet of a newspaper and wrapped it in it, and then he thrust it standing upright into the outside pocket of his jacket. He couldn’t have said why, nor what he wanted it for; it just seemed kinder to do that with it, not leave it there scorned and cast off.

The policeman who had come in immediately following the interne lingered to ask Rubin a few low-voiced questions, and jotted down while he asked. Then even he went.

Just they were left, and the instruments. They didn’t play any more, they didn’t dance any more, sing any more. Who wanted to play now?

They broke it up for the day. They spoke a little as they broke it up, sparingly, subduedly. A stranger had died in their midst.

“Which way you going, Fingers?”

“Monday, fellows.”

“Try to get another hall, will you, boss?”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.”

“These your lyrics, Bee? Better take ’em with you.”

“They’re so important. What a funny thing I do. Sing words from a paper for a living.” She sauntered toward the door, singing under her breath, “Proving that there’s a way. To shake your cares away... But thinking about death.”

Somebody said, “Funny it should happen right while she’s doing that death dance of hers.”

Sudden silence. As though one voice had, uncannily, spoken for all six of them.

Rubin and Jones were in his office the next day when the phone rang.

“Frank Palmieri of The Palms at Perth Amboy,” announced Goldie.

“Poms,” scoffed J. Mortimer in an aside. “It ain’t got a pom in it. In all Perth Amboy isn’t one pom. In the hull state of New Jersey you couldn’t find one. So he calls it The Poms. Put him on.”

He was extremely haughty, patronizing even.

“Forget about it, Frank. My client wouldn’t be interested.”

“I know, but I culled you too soon. Was just tucking it over with him now before you wrong up. Is a different situation entirely. Even if he wanted to, I wouldn’t let him.”

“Three thousand? Poddon me. [yawn] You keep in touch with me, I’ll find you some nice little band. Is lots around.”

“Hey, was that for us?” bleated Jones when he’d hung up. “What was that, a week? Are you crazy?”

“Look. I’m handling you like I want, not like you want. You want to have cake? Then don’t holler because I take away from you doughnuts.”

He shifted papers on his desk indignantly.

“Is also here a telegram, somewhere. The Roxy wants you for a stage show. I’m turning it down.”

“Oh, no!” pleaded Jones, holding his forehead crosswise. “The Roxy at Seventh Avenue and Fiftieth?”

“The Roxy in Plainfield, Ohio,” said Rubin adamantly.

The phone rang again.

“Mr. Smart here to see you.”

“Send him in. Is a publicity man, high class,” he informed Jones. “I want he should handle you. You’re going to see now a live wire.”

The live wire was a very well-insulated live wire. Almost a padded one. Even after a mattress-thick vicuna coat had been peeled off, there was still a lot of substance. Energy and heft combined. A very neat little mustache, like a freshly-sharpened pencil point at each end, that must have done things to women. A wristwatch that had everything on it but the weather forecast. Clothes that were expensive, and insisted they were from all the way over on the other side of the street. Just a walking business boom.

He sat down.

“Bill,” began Rubin, “this is Maxwell Jones. He has a band.”

“Now, Morty,” protested Smart disgruntledly, “I’ve asked you not to do this to me.” He seemed to be about ready to get up again and leave. At least a few preliminary shiftings indicated so.

“Bill,” said Rubin appeasingly, “did you come up to my office one day three years ago, just like now, and I had you meet four sisters? And they were ugly, they had ponims like Roy Rogers’ huss, they weren’t even so young any more—”

“The Anderson Sisters, ‘The Old Maids’ Quartet’,” supplied Smart. “And we made them even older and uglier, groomed them in reverse.” He glanced at his fabulous wristwatch, not at the time on it but as though it had some reference to that occasion.

“Now you can’t get away from them. From every dial they leak out, even from empty outlets in the wall.”

“Well,” said Smart modestly, “that’s me.”

“So you’re through, you can’t do it again? The world ended with the Anderson sisters, is nobody more comes after them?”

“I’m coasting now. I don’t like these uphill climbs.”

“With him you wouldn’t have to climb. Just a push, and you’re uff. Let me give you this boy’s story.”

Smart fronted a negligent palm. “I don’t care if he can play like an angel, I don’t care if he doesn’t know one note from another. All music sounds the same above the ya-ta-ta in a night-spot; it isn’t supposed to be listened to anyway. All I ask is one thing. Has he got a gimmick? Has he got something I can latch onto?”

“You be the judge,” urged Rubin. He dropped his voice confidentially. “He has brought back with him a dancer, from — where was it? I can’t remember the name. It uses up the whole alphabet nearly. All right, so the East. You know which East I mean? Not the East here, like Lung Island. By the Orient, the East. This dancer does a dance—”

“Don’t most dancers dance?” interrupted Smart languidly.

“Like this one, no!” insisted Rubin emphatically. “With this dance comes a superstition. In their beliff, could bring down something from the sky. Is liable to happen something, is taking a chance. Who knows what, I’m no expert. Right yesterday, here in New York — look, read this.” He shoved a paper at him.

“You mean, about this twenty-minute tie-up in the BMT?”

“No, no, no. The little one. The two lines under that. Look close, is very small print.” And when Smart had finished with the curt account of Luke’s passing, Rubin concluded, “Now you take it from there. You got a good in with the papers? You got contacts?”

Smart swept the paper aside. Then he sat very still for several moments, almost as if in a trance. He was holding a rapt finger pointed at attention, as if indicating an unseen feature-head blazoned across the wall before him that only he could see. “‘Death Comes Out of the East,’” he deciphered softly. “‘The Dance that May Kill if You Look Too Close.’” Suddenly he gave a galvanic jump, as though he had succeeded in frightening himself. Actually, it wasn’t fear that was involved, it was high-octane enthusiasm. He slammed at both his knees with his two hands at once, as though he were trying to fracture them then and there.

He answered his own question of awhile before. “Has he got a gimmick! Why, he doesn’t need to be handled, he’s self-propelled! He just needs to be wound up, and he’ll go off by himself, all over the place! I can get his name into every night-club column and onto every nightlife page that’s being printed today. Better than that! With that, I can get it into the straight-news sections of the papers, way up front. Sunday pictorial spreads are a pushover. I can have him set in three weeks, and ready to go. What am I doing sitting here?”

He got up and went, on an updraft.

He came back in again for his coat, on a downdraft.

“They shouldn’t expect a dead body every time she dances, hunh?” Rubin cautioned him. “That much nobody is guaranteeing. Just every once in a while a dead body. Maybe this time, maybe next, could be, who knows?”

“I’ll ration them.” To Jones he tossed off an airy, “Get ready to be somebody, young fellow. Bill Smart has started on you. Change your quarters, change your tailor, change your girl-friend, change your socks. Once it hits you, it’s going to hit you awful fast. Don’t let ’em catch you with your fame down.”

“Wha-what do you think we’ll be worth, once you have us set up, Mr. Smart?” Jones asked, almost overawed by so much assurance.

“You won’t be worth a plugged nickel more than you are at this minute! But no one’s paid what they’re worth, who ever heard of that? You’re paid what you make them think it’s worth to them, to have you, the fellows doing the buying. We’ll give it a reverse twist; ask fifteen, and then hold out until they’ve gone up to twenty.”

“Fif-teen hundred?” faltered Jones.

“Thousand,” snapped Smart. “Per week.”

He and his coat both went together, this time on a straight-away breeze. Some strategic weeks of Smart’s campaigning, and then the summons finally came. From Rubin to Jones.

“All right, pack your bags, case your instruments, be down here at my office inside the next hour. All of you, everybody together.”

And when they had collected and arrived, he greeted Jones with a fountain pen held bottom foremost toward his midriff.

“Sign here. And sign here. And sign here. Never mind reading. With a microscope I’ve gone over it already.”

Jones glanced curiously at the bottoms of the contracts as he finished with them. “What’d the guy sign it in red for?”

“He has a sense of humor,” offered Bill Smart, who was very much present. “Or maybe he wasn’t kidding at that. He explained to me there were two reasons for that. One was that this contract was drawn out of his own blood, so it should be signed to match. And two, that was the condition he was going to be left in at the end of the engagement; in the red.”

“Is it that good?”

“Good! Y’know what he suggested at the end, when the deal was winding up? He wanted to know if we wouldn’t take over his club and just let him front the band and work for us instead. He said he stood to come out ahead that way.”

“It’s an agent’s dream,” admitted Rubin. “I’m only worried I should wake up too soon. All right, get going. You got a train to make.”

Jones suddenly seemed to leak oblong chits of paper at every pocket. They all collected on the desk in front of Rubin like an autumn fall of albino leaves. “Pay these bills for me, Morty. So they won’t think I’m skipping town.”

“I woke up,” said Rubin glumly. He started winnowing through them. “Hosiery, twenty-five dollars.”

“He told me to change my socks,” Jones shrugged.

“Six suits, custom-made—”

“He told me to change my tailor.”

Rubin popped a hand to his cheek calamitously at the next. “You had to go there? Into a tower? You couldn’t stay closer to the ground? You got to make like eagles?”

“He told me to change my quarters.”

Rubin shook his head lugubriously when he’d come to the end of them. “You sure you didn’t leave out something? You mean this is all? Think hard, now. I wouldn’t want you should deny yourself anything.”

“I couldn’t change my girl,” said Jones blandly, “because I didn’t have any to begin with.”

A melting sigh sounded from over by the wall in the background where Mari was sitting docilely waiting along with the rest of the baggage. She gave him a soulful look, but it didn’t even register.

“You can pick one up after you get there,” Smart reassured him lightly. “They carry them anywhere you go. Best imported materials. Besides, you duck the excise tax that way.”

“All right, we ain’t got time for this light bandaging,” Rubin ordered, flagging them out with interplaying arms. “Make sure you got everything now. Pick up that trombone, pick up that — oh, excuse me, dolling, I didn’t know it was you — somebody take along the little dancer. In twenty minutes the train pulls out.”

Arrived under escort of Rubin and Smart at Grand Central Terminal, Lower Level, Track Seven, they all piled into one of the compartments, though technically it had been reserved solely for Bee and Mari, the rest of them just had coach seats.

Rubin shook hands all around, gave Mari a desultory pat on the head as though she were some kind of a mascot, and addressed a few words of paternal advice to them from the compartment-doorway, before getting off again. “All right, mazeltov, everybody, is all I can say. Which is meaning good luck, God bless you, and play good. I wouldn’t ask you to be saints, but if you got to be stinkers, be high-class stinkers. Remember, you’re in the big time now, you’re a star attraction. Make me proud I should say, ‘I am their agent.’ Come back wealthy.”

The door closed, and various bleeps and bloops sounded off from some of the instruments, in sheer animalistic high spirits.

“Put that bottle away. Morty’s looking right in the window at you from outside.”

“I am putting it away,” was the irrefutable answer, as the tilted head righted itself again.

“You frightened, honey?” crooned Bee solicitously. “Tame it down a little, boys, it’s the kid’s first tour.”

“No,” Mari smiled wanly. “Not if I can sit next to M-max.”

Bee plucked at someone, hauled him out, and made room for her. “Get up, lazy, and give it a chance to air.”

Mari nestled against him and he slung a proprietary, and thoroughly inattentive, arm about her. “Papa’s little gold mine. Papa’s little bonanza.” But he was looking the other way, out the window at Rubin.

“That’s tender talk for you,” Bee muttered sourly. “Hard and yellow, he calls her. And even covered with dirt.”

“Ba-a-a-awrd!” echoed sepulchrally along the tunnel outside.

Suddenly someone bethought himself of a very minor matter. The merest of afterthoughts. “Hey, what is this the train for, anybody know? I know it’s going, but where to?”

Jones flung up the window, hollered out into Rubin’s face, “Hey, where is it? You forgot to tell us! Where we booked into?”

“Details, details,” Rubin palmed calmingly at him. “The train knows the way, you wouldn’t go astray. You open tomorrow night at the Club Perroquet, Montreal, Canada. At the biggest salary for a band in all North America.”

Two

Montreal: Le Perroquet

1

Her first opening night. Her first audience. The Perroquet Club. Very small but very swank. Tails and white tie. If you wore only a dinner jacket, you were put over by the kitchen door. If you wore anything less, you didn’t get in at all.

She was sitting there cowering in front of the light-surrounded mirror and Bee was helping her put her makeup on. They were playing Number Ten in the book, and she had fifteen minutes to be afraid in yet. That’s an awful lot of time to be afraid in.

“Nervous, honey?”

“I feel like I’m going to die. I wish I were, but I’m afraid I’m not. Not soon enough.”

“That’s the spirit,” approved Bee briskly. “That’s the way it should be. If you told me you were calm and didn’t feel anything, I’d worry and send out for a doctor.” The patient began to take a little more interest in the proceedings. “What’re you doing that for?”

“Your face doesn’t match your specialty, honey. You look like a freshman at Vassar. Your face is years too soon for what you’re doing with your muscles.” She scanned the result. “Now you only look like a freshman at Vassar that’s been up studying all night.”

“Wait a minute. Let me try something.”

She tried something.

“That does it. That kills that pasteurized, dairy-fresh—” The subject wriggled terrifiedly. “Oo, they’ve stopped!”

She tried to rise from the chair, coifed and betowelled as she was. Bee had to press her down into it again.

“Whoa! There’s plenty of time yet. That’s a ten-minute break before they play your music.”

They all came in to wish her luck. They all crowded around her. The place was suddenly jam-packed with men.

“Wait a minute, what is this!” bawled Bee the demon chaperone. “Gents’ night at a Turkish bath?”

“She’s our little sister, and we’re her big brothers,” somebody asserted.

“Well, now that you’ve flashed your birth certificates at her, suppose you get the hell—”

“Let them stay,” she quavered. “I don’t feel afraid when I’m in the middle of all of them like this.”

“A pat of cheese in the middle of a congregation of rats, and she don’t feel afraid,” said Bee.

“We’ve been called rats,” one of them pointed out.

“Who by?”

“By that big mouse over there.”

“Don’t pat her so much on the shoulders,” ordered Bee, flinging off somebody’s hand. “She’s got to shimmy with those places.”

Jones suddenly showed up in the already overcrowded room, a bottle of champagne slanted in his arm. A waiter followed him in with a tray of glasses.

“Are you crazy?” squalled Bee. “Over my dead body! The kid’s ready to come apart as it is.”

A cork, pulling a tail of foam after it like a splashy comet, shot against the wall. Jones strewed a little into his palm, held it up over Mari’s head, deliberately sprinkled it over her.

“Whaddye think she is, a ship?” Bee protested.

“Fame and fortune, honey, and happiness,” he wished her. “For you, and all of us.” They all drank on it.

“Makes your eyes steam up, that stuff,” lied Bee. “Always does with me.” She leaned over impulsively and kissed her protégée atop the head. She took the wraps off her. “How d’you like her, boss-man? I did her makeup myself.”

“Sa-a-ay,” he drawled admiringly. “You’re good. That’s just the way I wanted her to look.”

She shivered and clung to Bee. “Scared witless,” the latter breathed in a confidential aside to him.

“Hold her here till she’s cued, Bee. Then take her out as far as the wings. Don’t let her go alone.”

“I know,” Bee said. “The last mile.”

He went over to the doorway. “Max!” Mari called out suddenly, almost in desperation.

He turned back.

“Would you... would you kiss me for good luck?”

“He has to be asked, yet,” said Bee drily, under her breath.

He came back to her and kissed her. He aimed it for her forehead, but she suddenly tilted her face, and he missed, landed on her lips.

He went on out. The two girls stood there alone together in the little dressing room, Bee’s one arm around her.

“It’s funny, but I’m not afraid any more,” she murmured. “Why is that?”

Bee shrugged. “Couldn’t be that stingy little kiss he just gave you. Shall we start walking, honey, so we get out there in time?”

Bee beside her, and her arm about her waist, she went on out. To her fame, and fortune, and maybe happiness.

Anyway, to her fame and fortune.

2

The first night was over now. The opening was over. And she was sitting there alone broadside to the mirror, just waiting. In a plaid coat that fitted her like the tarpaulin covering a statue before its unveiling. And a beret that slopped over below her ear.

A lot of bustle outside, passing back and forth, but no more music.

Going home time.

She just sat there waiting, forgotten by everyone.

Bee suddenly came hustling in, after something she’d left behind; saw her, was reminded of her then.

“You still...?” She went back to the doorway, inquired in a train despatcher’s voice, “Who’s taking the kid home?”

The head in the beret remained passively downturned. “Never mind. I can find my own—”

Jones’ voice suddenly came back in answer from somewhere out of sight down the passage. “It’s all right, Bee. I’ll see that she gets home.”

Bee relayed the message, gratuitously. “Your quote husband unquote is going to take you home, honey.”

The head in the beret came erect. Suddenly she was concerned with her appearance.

“This coat fits me like a tent. Why does there have to be so much of it?”

She turned plaintively mirrorward.

“Why did I have to buy a beret? Every other girl in New York looked good in them. And I look like a tadpole.”

“You look all right to me, honey. Anyway, you’re only going home to sleep, aren’t you? Max said he wants you to get all the rest you can, that’s why he wouldn’t let you come to the party with the rest of us.”

“Yes, but if the party is in celebration of my success, why can’t I be at it? He’s not my father. He’s not my brother. He’s not even my doctor.”

“He’s your boss, honey,” Bee reminded her gently. “Anyway, you don’t want to go there. I know those parties, they’re all alike. They just stand around holding stingers and telling dirty jokes.”

“Does he?” was the rapt inquiry.

“Does he,” she got back.

“Well, why can’t I be told one? I know how to laugh too.”

“All right, remind me to tell you a dirty joke sometime.”

“I don’t want ’em from you.”

“Then who would you like one from?” Bee wanted to know inattentively.

No answer.

“I’ve got to go, honey. Brad’s waiting. Get a good night’s rest.”

Jones came in her wake. “Oh, there you are. All set?”

He crooked his arm at her, and she fastened herself on it like a barnacle. He looked around. “Got everything?”

She tightened her grip, choked the life out of his arm. “Everything,” she murmured shyly. It went over into the outfield bleachers behind him.

He put out the dressing-room light.

“Was I good?” she asked, trotting dutifully down the passage.

“You mean you don’t know yet?”

“Well... it was so still.”

“That’s your answer. That was your applause. Others may get the beat of hands. You get the greatest tribute than an audience can give: perfect silence. It took fifteen minutes for it to wear off.”

She didn’t seem one hundred per cent satisfied. “I mean, did you like me?” she persisted.

“Like?” he said. “What kind of a word is that? I don’t know where you came from, and I don’t know where you’ll go. I don’t know how I got you. I only know—”

“What?” she begged. “What?” she pleaded.

He shrugged it off lightly, with a quirk and a smile. “You’re my magic. You’re my charm. G’night, Mari.”

Couldn’t I be more than that? something inside her mourned. And the backstage doorman had had to horn into it and spoil it anyway.

They hustled up the little side alley to the street.

“What’s the party going to be like?” she hinted broadly. “It’s only about two o’clock, isn’t it?”

She never got the chance to find out, on either count. There was a girl standing there alone, further down from where they’d emerged, in front of the club’s main entrance. Nothing cheap. Hourglass-tight in an expensive wrap, gown touching the sidewalk. Tapping the seconds out of a minute with the tip of one foot.

The kind of girl who doesn’t stand like that very long, in front of a club entrance or anywhere else. Who doesn’t stand for it if she does have to stand.

She turned and saw them come out to the curb. She seemed to recognize him. A velvety contralto reached them in inquiry. Inquiry that was really a command. “Well, Max? How about it?”

He waved his arm to her propitiatingly. “Right with you, dear.”

He handed Mari into the cab. He handed the driver a bill.

“Take this young lady to the Mount Royal. See that she gets there safe, now. Take very good care of her. She’s something special.”

He closed the door on her.

He tipped his hat.

He stayed behind.

The cab driver bent down concernedly a few minutes later to investigate something in the region of his pedals and clutches.

“That’s not your motor, driver,” she said tearfully in back of him. “I was just pounding both feet together on the floor.”

3

Bill Smart came in, third performance, with a briefcaseful of publicity releases, dumped them all out on the dressing-table and demanded zestfully, “Wherza chief?”

“We’re not an Indian tribe,” remarked Bee drily, looking up from inspecting a pair of nylons. “And if you mean that train that runs to the Coast, you’ll find it in Chicago, two blocks that way and then three to the right.”

“All right, end-lady. Where’s the guy you work for? That suit you better?”

“Look, watch where you dump all that wastepaper, will you? The kid’s got to make up yet, and she’s going to be pasting newspaper-clippings onto her eyelashes instead of mascara.”

She couldn’t dampen him. “Get this. It goes into all the papers, tomorrow’s editions.”

She scanned the ad layout he handed her, Mari peering over her shoulder.

“Will it happen here?” in big black letters, for a head. And then in smaller letters: “Every place she dances...” He superimposed another on it. “And latch onto this one.”

Bee read it aloud. “Is your life insurance fully paid up? If not, don’t go to Le Perroquet tonight to see...”

“Oh, and that reminds me.” He turned to Mari. “I’ve made an appointment for you with a photographer. Tomorrow afternoon. I want you to have some new stills taken. I want you down like this...”

He got down on his belly on the floor, in front of the two horrified girls. Then he propped his elbows close together. Then he cupped his hands. Then he propped his chin in them. Then he stared pie-eyed at, insofar as they could judge, a balled-up discarded towel that somebody had flung down over by the baseboard.

“You insanitary thing,” jeered one of the bandsmen, who had been standing watching from the doorway. “What’re you doing down there?”

Smart ignored him. “In front of your face there’ll be a cobra. You know, sitting on its tail, like they do. You’re staring soulfully into its eyes, and it’s staring into yours.” Mari gave an exclamation of alarm at this point, and clutched tightly at Bee for protection.

“Not a live one,” he said testily. “I found a guy here that can make all sorts of things. He’s making me one up, out of rubber and papier-mâché and things. We’ll have an invisible wire rigged to hold it upright—”

“Then you stare it in the eye!” burst out the doughty Bee. “Spit in its eye, for all I care, and for my part it should spit right back in yours! What’re you trying to turn her into, a Coney Island sideshow attraction? How many times have you seen her do this dance? It’s an allegory; there’s no snake in it, not even a reproduction of one. It’s her own muscles that give the illusion of one!”

“I never saw one of those things, even out there,” protested Mari firmly. “The whole time I lived there. The first time I ever saw a snake in my life was when Mr. Bradley’s parents took me to the Bronx Zoo in New York a few weeks ago. They thought I liked them! I ran so fast they had to run after me to catch up with me. I hate them even worse than you people do here in the United States.”

“Never mind, honey.” Bee patted her consolingly. “You’re not going to make goo-goo eyes at any snake. Not down on the floor and not anywhere else.”

“Oh, so my ideas don’t suit you,” Smart said indignantly.

The answer he got was nothing if not frank. “I got a strong stomach,” proclaimed Bee. “But somebody hand me that old hat of Brad’s pegged up there, and then stand clear.”

Jones had been standing there looking over the releases. “These’re all right,” he said approvingly. “And you’re doing a good job, Bill.” He came over and back-slapped him appeasingly. “But... we’ll forget about the stills with the snake, huh?”

“Okay,” said Smart, “Okay. No snakes, then no snakes. Y’got a good band, Max,” he added loudly, as though Jones were some distance off. “But there’s just one thing. You’ve got too many blondes in it.”

“Hand me the shoe-blacking,” murmured Bee demurely.

“Well, I’ve got to be on my way,” Smart said, when the laugh had tapered. “This is just the groundwork. I haven’t even begun yet. You’re already going up like an express elevator. You’re going to go up like a skyrocket, when I touch off my little fuse.” He rubbed his hands dynamically. “This is Wednesday, right? I’m going to let it ride three more nights. But watch Saturday. That’s the big night. Just watch Saturday.”

“What does he mean?” somebody wondered.

“Don’t you know?” said Bee knowingly. “Give you three guesses.”

4

Bee and Mari were sitting there after the latter’s performance the following night, with the door left open, when a slow wash of perfume came floating in and engulfed them. The kind that comes out of machines in theater lounges at ten cents a squirt — machines that have stood too long without having their oil changed. Bee, bending low, sniffed suspiciously. “Somebody’s burning French pancakes out in the gal—” she started to opine. Then she turned and looked. Mari did too.

A fairly buxom female of considerable, if slightly shopworn, flounciness and finery, had paused briefly on her way past to look in at them. Seeing that she had attracted their attention, she resumed her indolent progress with a reassuring “No ’arm, lydies; just strolling parst,” and drifted from sight.

“Did you see that?” Bee demanded. “Is she made up to go on like that, or does she always go around looking that way? Wait a minute. There’s no floorshow here. She must be on the level. One of those gals that stand leaning against lampposts in the evening.”

Mari tittered. “I know what you mean.”

“Did you lamp the low-traction handbag, down at about ankle-level? And the peek-a-boo blouse. All boo and no peek.”

“Oo, that perfume!” complained Mari hilariously, fanning her face. “What is it?”

“Lilies of the ashcan and burnt feathers, with just a dash of lighter fluid.” She went over toward the doorway flapping a towel before her. “Let me see if I can’t get some of it out of here.”

Something caught her eye. She paused, peering narrowly past the opening.

“She’s standing down there at the end of the passage, just back of the bandstand, stealing a free look at the dancers on the floor,” she reported.

At that moment the music stopped.

“Here come the boys,” she said. She returned to Mari. “Keep count in the glass,” she instructed her. “They’re going to have to pass her, up at that end. And then they’re going to have to pass us, down here at this. Just let’s see if anybody’s missing.”

Trumpet went by.

Drums and percussion went by.

Piano went by. Not literally, that is — the space wouldn’t have been wide enough — but as symbolized by Fingers.

All of them puffing like chimneys.

Each one clocked himself on the mirror.

Clarinet went by.

Steel guitar went by.

Finally even Jones went by, paper cup of Coca-Cola (to give him the benefit of the doubt) held brimmingly balanced in his hand.

He turned and glanced in, without stopping. “Hello, ladies,” he saluted them, with a hoist of his paper cup that didn’t spill a drop. Of either Coca-Cola, or benefit-of-the-doubt.

Bee’s long tapered nails began to drum on the edge of the dressing-table. “How many did you count?” she asked with adding-machine precision.

“Six,” said Mari.

“That’s what I got too. Somebody’s been detoured. And never mind telling me who, I’m way ahead of you.”

She strode over to the doorway, looked down the passage. She folded her arms with heavy confirmation, she nodded ponderously for Mari’s benefit. She came back into the room again.

“Sure,” she said. “Sure. Every one of those boys was holding a smoke in his hands. You saw them. But who gets stopped, and who gets asked for a light, and who has to stand there making an Indian fire-dance ritual out of it! Ev-’ry time!” She slapped herself on the thigh in punctuation.

Mari laughed a little, charitably. “It’s hard to refuse when somebody asks. Especially a Woman.”

Bee eased back to the doorway again, to take a few more bird’s-eye views. “I wish you could see him. Standing there with his cigarette pushing hers, the two of them curved over like they were playing London Bridge is Falling Down. He can’t just hand her a match, he has to get her started person-to-person!”

She contemplated the hidden tableau with leashed exasperation.

“I never saw a cigarette take so long to light up,” she relayed. “He must be breathing in while she’s breathing out.”

“Maybe one of them’s wet,” said Mari eruditely.

“One of them is,” glowered Bee. “All wet. And I don’t mean the cigarette either.”

“How can he get that close to all that terrible perfume?” wondered Mari.

“Oh, what do they know?” said Bee disparagingly. “To one of them it probably smells good.”

She reconnoitred some more. “He has to lean toward her, like the Tower of Pisa,” she reported embitteredly, “with his heinie sticking elegantly out.”

She strode back to the table again, this time in explosive decision. “This is too good to miss, the way he’s turned and the position he’s in!”

She picked up a long-handled hairbrush of Mari’s and glided from view down the passage, weighting it tentatively in her hand as she went.

For several moments the passage remained silent. Then there was the sound of a reverberating impact, a squeal of feminine dismay, and a figure went flitting hurriedly past the doorway, finery shimmering with haste.

Bee reappeared, at a far more leisurely gait, a grim smile of satisfaction on her face. She flung the hairbrush, which had become fractured in the middle and hung limp, back where she had taken it from. “That broke that up,” she reported. “You should have seen the shower of sparks went up between them. Like a blowtorch backfiring. I saw one cigarette go kiting up in the air. I think he must have swallowed his.”

Bradley trailed in, even more slowly, looking extremely disconcerted, red in the face, and rubbing himself ruefully.

“What was that for?” he complained. “Sneaking up behind me without any warning and whacking the daylights out of me! I got singed from sparks all down the inside of my collar.” He clutched at it and shook it out a little.

Bee turned on him in denunciation. “How many times I have to tell you, keep away from strange streetwalkers when you’re around me!” she thundered.

“She couldn’t find her way out and asked me which way the alley was, that’s all,” he protested.

Bee brayed raucous derision. “She don’t need to ask anyone how to get to alleys; she spends her whole time in them. I bet she can show you alleys that no one else even knew was around.”

“I never saw anyone like you,” he complained mildly, dabbing a little cold cream on his neck here and there with the tip of one finger. “She asked me could I oblige her with a light, why should I turn her down?”

“Then throw her a match. You don’t have to put it to her like that.”

“Please. This kid’s fresh out of a heathen temple,” he reminded her virtuously.

“The cigarette,” explained Bee in an outraged basso profundo. She turned to Mari, spread her hands explanatorily. “I don’t object to competition. What I object to is the kind of competition I get. Other women have to worry about these smart, clever little tricks that come along, baby faces, wearing a million dollars worth of clothes; you know, really high-class competition. Do I? No, I’m up against the trade-unions. Some bedraggled sidewalk-pounder’ll toil by, practically wearing an excavation-lantern on her arm, and he’ll put his neck out of joint for blocks afterwards, staring back at her. Even with me right there beside him. Trying to let on that he’s looking for a taxi, or that he’s trying to figure out how far we’ve walked and where we are right now. I purposely led him into a fire-hydrant once and he nearly gutted himself.”

“No, you don’t understand,” he tried to convince her. “I’m not interested in them personally, it’s just from a... from a... well, like a scientific point of view. I never can figure them out at first sight, like some people can.

I never can tell, right off, if they are or aren’t. So sometimes, when I look around like that, all I’m doing is wondering if they are or aren’t.”

“If you look around at them, brother, they are, all right!” she let him know in no uncertain tone.

He shook his head like a person who feels he is completely misunderstood, went out and closed the door after him.

Bee waited first to make sure he was out of earshot. Then she dropped her voice a little. “I can’t really get sore at him. Or stay sore, anyway. It’s like a game we play with each other. It’s our way of still courting each other, I guess. You see... I’m crazy in love with him. Which is the same as saying crazy, period.”

5

In the taverns on St. Antoine Street, Bill Smart was spending the evening playing hop-scotch along the bars. A version of it that was all his own. He used a glass of mixed ale and stout for marker, known colloquially as “Hoff ‘n’ Hoff” (most of the barmen were Limeys). He touched each vacant space with the bottom of it, and he touched his underlip with the rim of it, once to each position, and that was all he did with it; the level of its contents didn’t subside any. He didn’t hop on one foot the way kids do, and there were no chalked boxes on the floor to guide him, but it was hop-scotch all right, if anything ever was.

He would start at the upper end of each bar (he’d been in three already, doing this, by eleven), and then he would “skip” from there into each vacant space in turn, “hopping” over the intervening contestant. Although they didn’t even know they were in the game at all. He didn’t go over their heads, but around back of them, and into the vacant bar-space on the other side. When there was no vacant space, he made one, by insinuating his person, with a disarming grin and murmured apology to avert trouble. He only lighted alongside single or individual bar-standers, never when there was more than one together. Two lines of dialogue, sometimes only one, and he moved on again.

Heads turned after him, as he progressed, and fingers were tapped suggestively against skulls, but since he was not actually disturbing the peace or giving offense, no move was made to check him.

And then besides, the expression “buddy” instantaneously gave him away as an American, and Americans are a little odd, the whole world knows that. They just might go in for playing one-man hop-scotch in taverns.

The lines of dialogue, never varied, were: First line, “You working, buddy?”

If the answer was yes, no second line, instead a hop to the next box.

If the answer was no, second line: “You want to be?”

Sometimes he was forestalled and never got a chance to use the second line. Such as:

“No, and I don’t ’ime to be neither.”

“And ’oo the ’ell are you to be arsking? Bevin?”

“Think I’m soft in me ’ead or something? And what ’appens to me bloomin’ unemployment pension, in that case?”

By midnight he was taking a disheartened view of the Canadian economic situation, postwar variety. All the right sort of people seemed to be employed, and all the wrong sort of people seemed to be unemployed. By one he’d acquired a future lifelong distaste to ale and stout, both separate and combined. And also to Buckingham cigarettes, and fifty-cent pieces with effigies of Elizabeth II on them, and the mother-tongue as spoken from up between the eyes somewhere. By two he’d quit playing for the night, and was on his way on foot back to his room. There still remained a lot of other streets, and a lot of other taverns, but not an awful lot of other nights.

There was a touch on his arm, and a figure shuffled up alongside of him, materializing from the gloom of some doorway he’d just passed.

“Got the price of a cup of coffee, guv’nor?”

He stopped short, whirled about, and peered almost fiercely, trying to penetrate the dimness.

The supplicant, mistaking the stiletto-sharpness of the scrutiny, raised dissuading palms and prepared to retreat. “Now, if you’re going to get that mad, guv’nor, just forget I asked you.”

“Hold it.” Smart dug into his pocket, flipped an Elizabeth II into the obscurity, palm-flesh clapped, and it never hit the ground.

“Let me see you in the light,” Smart ordered. “Come over here. Now turn. Walk away from me. Now turn. Come on back.”

“What do I have to do, drill for a cup of coffee? I only want to drink it, I don’t want to defend it.”

“Take that thing off. That thing on your head.”

“I already thanked you, guv’nor. What do I have to do, uncover and bow me head too?”

“You look good and pale.”

“I look pale, but what’s good about it?”

Smart didn’t answer that. “How old are you? Mind my asking?”

“Nice of you to take an interest, guv’nor,” was the sarcastic answer. “Sixty-five.”

“Oh, come on now, you’re still thinking about handouts. On the level.”

“Fifty-five?”

“I don’t want anyone too old.”

“Oh, well, why didn’t you say so? Forty-seven; and I couldn’t go below that for my own brother.”

“Want to work?”

“Not if it’s lifting anything heavy.”

“Just lifting a champagne-glass. That too heavy?”

“Packing them, you mean? I’m allergic to excelsior, gets in my nose.”

“No, just one glass. The same glass, for about half an hour or so. Up and down, up and down.”

“Anything in it?”

“Champagne in it.”

“I do that, and get money too?”

“There’s a little more to it than that. Oh, nothing to be frightened of. Ever do any acting?”

“I’ve done a bit of everything, in my time. I’ve played a walk-on a couple of times, in traveling road companies.”

“Well, this is like a walk-on too, in a way. You walk on. And then you just have to let yourself be carried off. Look, it’s kind of late now. I’ll tell you all about the rest of it tomorrow. Look me up at my hotel, ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Ford Hotel. Don’t come into the lobby, looking the way you do. I’ll meet you outside of it, down on the corner. Ten sharp.”

“Right-o, guv’nor.”

“And don’t keep calling me governor. I haven’t a state to my name. Now there’s money in this, so you’re a fool if you’re not there.”

“Oh, I’ll be there all right, guv — I mean, you can count on me.”

“I don’t believe you will. But I think I know a way of making sure you are.” He opened his billfold, canvassed its inserts, finally withdrew a ten-dollar Canadian bank certificate. He held it taut the long way, between both hands. “See this?”

“Do I see it? Can’t you hear the patter of the little drops as they roll down off my chin?”

“You’ve got a sense of humor too; I like that. No, keep your hands down. All right, just to wipe off your mouth, if you must. All right, if you show up you’ve got yourself ten dollars just for standing on a corner.”

“And to think of the many times I’ve done it for free,” murmured the recipient ruefully.

In the snappy morning sunlight the figure standing waiting for Smart on the corner didn’t look so good. The darkness the night before had done him a favor. All he needed was a few sheaves of corn sprouting around his feet to give a crow a bad scare. In fact, Smart walked all the way around him three times in a tight little circle before he made up his mind.

“This is going to earn you a hundred dollars, did you know that?”

“No, but it’s sure nice to find it out. How many months can I get for it, whatever it is?”

“There’s not a law against it; not an ordinance, not a single restriction as far as I know. They can’t even pull you in for it.”

“First,” Smart went on, “we’ll do a little necessary outside repair work. Just enough to get you through the lobby without being turned back.”

He led him down the street to a barbershop, stepped in with him, handed the master barber a bill. “Give this man a shave, a haircut — and above all, a shampoo. I’ll be waiting outside.”

“You’re so brutally frank,” said the patient, letting himself into one of the chairs.

Then he took him to a Turkish bath. “Now go in there. Nothing fancy, just a good stiff hose and a scrubbing.” He handed him a brown-paper parcel. “Put these on after you’re through. I don’t know your size, but it doesn’t matter too much.”

“At five dollars, I’d be insulted,” said the man uncomplainingly. “Not at a hundred.”

“Now I think that’ll do,” Smart said when he’d come out again. “Come on up to the room now. I’m going to rehearse you up there.”

He closed the door behind them.

“Take off your coat. I want you to have plenty of room. Now before we begin, you better let me know. Nothing wrong with your heart, is there?”

“Sound as a whistle,” bragged the man, whomping himself on the chest. “Outdoor life, you know.”

Smart brought forward a straight-backed chair.

“Get on this.”

He took a lamp down, coasted a small table up in front of him.

“Now, you’re sitting at a night-club table.”

He put a water-tumbler down in front of him.

“This is champagne here.”

The man glanced into its dry depths, then up again. “How can you do this to me?”

Smart planted hands to knees, crouched forward. “All right. Let me see you fall off that chair.”

The man swerved aside, one leg went up, and one arm went down.

“I didn’t say duck a flying pop-bottle. Try it again.”

The man tried it again.

“Keep that leg down. You act like a human pointer in reverse. Look, drop dead, will you?”

“You drop dead yourself,” said the man with not unjustifiable aggrievement.

“No, no, I’m not making a wish. I’m trying to get you to act a part for me. Fluid, see? Fluid drive. Sort of spill off the chair. Sort of ripple. Think of a waterfall. Make like a waterfall — splosh! splosh! splash!”

“How was that?” asked the man, looking up at him from below the table.

“Don’t wiggle your hips. And above all keep those spirals with your stomach out of it. You’re not a corkscrew going down into the neck of a bottle.”

“Please,” pleaded the subject, moistening his lips, “some other illustration.”

“Let’s see it again,” said the inexorable Smart. “Dress it up a little. You’re not expecting this to happen, you know—”

“I am now,” mourned the exhibit to himself.

“—Relax, tap a cigarette, be nonchalant. Now! Upps! Just like that!”

The man looked up mutely, stiff-arming himself against the floor.

“Well, it’s not too good, but it’s not too bad either. Nobody’ll be watching you during this part of it, anyway. It’s what comes after that counts.”

“Then what do I do?”

“You don’t move from then on. Dozens of eyes’ll be on you, and if you make the slightest move, you’ve spoiled the whole thing. No matter what goes on don’t stir. You’ll feel your shirt being opened, maybe. Or maybe even one of your eyelids’ll be tipped up and then dropped again. That’ll just be the doctor. At least they’ll think he’s a doctor, he’ll have a medical kit with him. Then you’ll be carried out and shoved into an ambulance. It’s just a rented ambulance, a private one. It’ll take you for a short ride. As soon as you get around the corner, you can climb out and go off and enjoy your hundred dollars in peace. Now get back on the chair and let’s give it a good polish.”

Smart started to keep time with one arm, like a bandmaster.

“Drop dead. Over you go. Upsa-daisy. Back on the chair.

“Drop dead. Over you go. Upsa-daisy. Back on the chair.”

The man fanned himself; his tongue lolled out. “Please, guv’nor,” he panted. “Give me a minute to catch my breath, will you? I never dropped dead so often in me life before.”

6

They gave him a table for one, on the tip of the dance floor. He was in tails and white tie. He even wore a monocle in his eye. He looked like pre-war aristocracy. He carried himself like the Russian Grand Dukes did when they commuted regularly between St. Petersburg and the Paris cabarets.

The next time anyone noticed him, there was champagne before him. Not to say that they did, but if they did, it was there. He wasn’t noticeably drinking it (he wasn’t obvious about anything), but his table waiter was at his side a good deal.

The cigarette girl, moving away from him, had an almost beatific expression on her face as she fumbled at the neckline of her costume, putting his tip away.

He took out his monocle, polished it, slotted it in again.

That was all there was time for. Mari suddenly swooped from nowhere into a pool of greenish-gold, was holding herself still as if she were drinking deeply of it from off the floor. Then and only then a low throbbing of drums, which had started some moments before, filtered into the general awareness. Then and only then, lights began to go off.

He was erased from people’s minds. Mari was in them instead, was in every brain. Limned in greenish-gold, writhing, swaying.

He fell off the chair most artistically. Oozed off it, with no sharp angles, no bumps. Just the way Bill Smart had been trying to say it should be done. Pulled the cloth just a little with him, and then let go of it again, so that not even the champagne upset, just gave a disruptive swirl at the top of its goblet.

Then he spread himself out on the floor, uncoiled, so to speak. Relaxed, almost as if — well, as if he were tired, and he liked it down there, and he’d decided to stay there, now that he was down there. And then he did stay, on his back and with his face turned up.

Almost unbelievably, the monocle was still in place in his eye. The light gave off a glassy gleam from it, made him seem blind in one eye.

There had been a minimum of noise. It was a well-bred death if there ever was one. No noise at all, in fact. Just the soft fall.

Only those immediately around his table were aware of what had happened. Nobody else in the place, for some moments, was. A headwaiter hastened forward, and dipped from sight. A second waiter joined him.

They picked him up between them and carried him back out of sight. And Mari was lying prostrate on the floor. And the drums had stopped at last.

They carried him into the manager’s office and placed him on a settee in there. The manager took the monocle out of his eye, only now, and it was a curious thing to see how the deep-etched skin-creases slowly relaxed. “Bring in a doctor, quickly!” the manager ordered, with low-voiced curtness. He hated to have things like this happen in his place.

A doctor — or at least a man who said he was one — was ushered in with such rapidity that it was almost as if he had been waiting just on the other side of the door for his cue.

He went straight to the patient, bent down low beside him. And the rest of it was just as Smart had foretold. He tipped one eyelid, closed it again. He opened his shirt-front briefly, did something there, then let it be again. And that was all. The next they knew he had risen and was going away once more. He shook his head, but he didn’t stop, he just kept going. Back to whatever table and whatever party was still waiting for him out there, and more agreeable than this.

“Can’t help you,” he said, turning toward them from the door. “Nothing to be done. He’s stone dead. I have a lobster Newburg coming up out there, and those things spoil when they stand. Better notify the police.”

He opened the door and went out.

In the wings Jones was just setting Mari down on her own feet. He kissed her between the eyes, but professionally, strictly professionally.

“Oh, this is a miracle!” he breathed devoutly. “This is a dream! Listen to that silence! Listen to them sighing and slowly coming back to themselves!”

She took his arm and they started for the dressing room.

“Did you see what happened out there just now?” she whispered.

That was one of Bill Smart’s brain waves. I think it muffed, if you ask me. It went off too quietly.

“Where is he?” Jones asked Bee as they entered the dressing room. “I suppose we have to show our appreciation.”

“Paying off the corpse, probably,” she answered drily.

“I wonder how much he gave the stiff for his work. They don’t have a union scale, as I understand it. I was watching it from the wings. I’ll tell you one thing; that guy was hammy, if anyone ever was.”

“I thought he was real good,” said Bradley, coming in with the rest of the bandsmen. “Who’d you expect him to get for it, Lunt?”

“He was good,” somebody else corroborated. “He had real talent.”

“Yeah, well you had the lights in your eyes,” Bee argued. “He didn’t fool me for a minute.”

They all turned their heads. Bill Smart was standing there in the doorway, riffling through a stacked handful of paper currency. They all went over and ganged up around him, everybody trying to get in a word at once. “Good stunt, Bill! You pulled it off just right.”

“It was so natural. Just like real life.”

“How much’re you shelling out for getting the guy to do it?” asked Bee, the nosey.

“Ten dollars,” said Smart, very tight-lipped. “And that’s only to keep his mouth shut. Hey, you,” he called over his shoulder. A figure in tails and white tie appeared in the dressing-room doorway. Smart shoved one of the bills at him, put the rest away. “Take this and get out of here. Don’t let me see you again. You can keep the clothes.”

“Ten dollars!” squawked Bee, incredulous.

Bill Smart swallowed a lump in his throat. He swung the door closed, full into the disappointed face of the rented corpse. “You see, the guy that keeled over and died, out there, just now,” he explained, with a constrictive shortage of breath, “wasn’t the guy that I planted there. Wasn’t this guy you just saw me pay off, but somebody else entirely. Somebody who really did keel over and die.”

Three

The Excelsior

1

The Paris express brought them in at four in the afternoon.

She was in her compartment, watching a line of poplars gliding by outside, like something on a moving belt coming their way from the city, leaving it as they entered.

He knocked on the door. She could tell it was his knock, not the porter’s. She already knew all those things about him: his step, his whistle, his knock on a door. Knew them so well, her heart had auditioned them so often. Knew all the things there were to know about him, except how he kissed, how his arms felt tight around your back, how his whisper sounded close beside your ear. She’d had no practice.

She opened it immediately.

He was all set to leave the train.

Her heart perspired a little inside her, the way it always did at sight of him.

He looked so American. He always looked so American, no matter where they went, no matter where they were. So clean and carefree and — friendly. (But friendly toward all the world, so what good did that do you?) Like a shaving cream ad or an ad of a young man smoking a cigarette. So American. So juvenile, so energetic, so never-tired, so never-dull.

A draft along the corridor was blowing his neck-scarf back across his shoulders, instead of it being tucked sedately under his coat where it belonged. The polka dots on it seemed to fill the air, like little whirling disks.

“All set?” he asked.

“I’m all ready.”

“Help you with anything?” he offered.

“The porter will be back in a minute.”

“Milano,” he said. He’d already learned it the way the Italians said it.

He felt good, she could tell. He always did, whenever they were going to begin a new stand like this.

“Milano, get ready, you’re gonna hear some music like you never heard before.” He winked at her. He perked his elbow out toward her, for her to take his arm.

She took it, but she wanted more than that. She could almost hear her heart say inside her, “Is that all I get?”

She walked down the car corridor like that, on his arm.

Then the train stopped, and they got down, and they all stood around there beside it. Wisps of steam, and echoing noises, and hand-trucks rolling by, and a big vaulted glass roof glooming overhead.

A man in driver’s uniform edged forward, touched the visor of his cap. “Signor Gio-ness? Compliments of Signor Sertuchi, of Excelsior.” And led them outside, to two limousines standing by for their disposal.

They were driven to a hotel, the Principe di Savoia. On the way, he lit a cigarette for her, and patted her twice on the back of her hand. Even though he was looking the other way as he did so.

“Well, I get to be in the same hotel with him, at least,” she consoled herself wryly, as they went up in the elevator.

When they both got out together, he was shown to one door, and she to another. “Well, I get to be on the same floor with him, at least.”

She closed the door.

“It was nice being together,” she mused bitterly, “from the railway station to the hotel.” She looked at the back of her hand, where he’d patted it. “What more do you expect? You’ve had your token for today.”

She went to the windows. Immense cathedral-spires in the middle distance. Tricky little Fiats and pocket-sized Toppolinos scurrying along for dear life. And now and then a lordly Alfa-Romeo.

Milan. She turned away again with a shrug.

It was always the same. Always the same loneliness.

2

He knocked on her door.

“We’re all going down to the Excelsior to meet Sertuchi. Want to come with us?”

“No. I’ll stay here. You do the honors for me. He won’t be put out, will he?”

“No; probably good technique. He expects you to be aloof and uppish. I’ll look after your dressing room and everything for you. I’ll be back and take you to dinner,” he promised.

He knocked again. He was only forty minutes late. But this was Italy; the pace was slower, she supposed. It was the fifth time she’d opened her door, but the first four times there hadn’t been any knock.

He was in his tux. She had on the black lace she’d just bought last week at Dior’s. He had roses and gardenias for her. He had a smile for her.

She made a mistake when she first took the flowers from him. Sunrise came up all over her face.

“Oh, Max...” she breathed gratefully.

“Compliments of your new boss, Signor Rafaele Sertuchi.”

“Oh... I see,” she sighed dismally. Sunset went down all over her face.

“He kisses your hand.”

He kissed her hand. Couldn’t it have come from you? she wondered wistfully.

“Should have been with us. We all had champagne in his private office. And you ought to see what a layout; lives like a king. Thick pile carpet on the floor, gold furniture, crystal chandeliers. These operators over here must sock it away. Wonder how they do it?”

She shrugged; what did she care about that.

He readied his arm for her to take. “What do you say we go down and feed the face?” He didn’t say. How good you look. He didn’t say...

For once she didn’t take it, left it waiting on its own. “Not when you ask me that way.”

He grinned.

He made her a courtly bow, sliced his arm across his stomach. “Signorina?”

“I can get that from the doorman downstairs.”

“What do I have to do, rehearse for a meal?”

“It’s so simple,” she said. “It’s already half-spoiled, because it should have come from you in the first place. But I’ll brief you for the next time.” She took his hand and placed it a little around her waist. “You lead me a little from here. Just a little. You take my hand in yours and lead me a little with that. Coaxing. But: you mean it a little. You want me to a little. If I don’t come, your evening won’t be quite the same. If I’m not there, there won’t be any lights at your table...”

He held his breath, as though he were actually practising something. “How am I doing?”

“You mean it a little,” she reminded him almost inaudibly.

Suddenly he kissed her. The sun made another of its false starts upward.

“That’s for luck,” he said.

Did you have to spoil it? she said to herself.

They went down to dinner.

Well, he had to eat. She had to eat too. They were both in the same hotel. And if there was plenty of light at the table it was all supplied by the Milan Electric Company.

Always the same loneliness.

A page was standing beside him, waiting to get his attention.

“Telefono, Sigñor.”

“Sure it’s for me?” He didn’t look so surprised, though, she thought.

“Si, Sigñor. Signor Massa-well Gio-ness, non?”

“Roughly, that’s about the name,” he agreed. “Excuse me.” He got up and left her there.

She took a sip of her champagne and it had gone flat. She took a puff of her cigarette and it had gone stale. And she knew if she took a nibble at one of those sugar-coated almonds it would be bitter as hell. So she didn’t.

When he came back he looked a little redder than when he’d left. (Maybe the booth had been warm.)

I’m not going to ask him, she promised herself. I’m not going to ask him.

“What did Sertuchi want?” she said finally.

“When?” he said, and then crossed that out. “Oh, just wanted to make sure we were all comfortable and everything was under control.”

So it wasn’t Sertuchi. So he’d already met someone in Milan. That explained the extra forty minutes. There must have been a party given in those private offices, with just a few hand-picked professionals present to welcome him and his bandsmen.

When they got up from the table, he asked, elaborately casual, “What’re you doing tonight?”

“Nothing.” But she didn’t mean she refused to do anything, she meant she was willing to do anything he suggested.

He twisted it around to fit the first meaning. “Good idea. Neither am I. Think I’ll take it easy the first night. I guess I’ll hit the hay.”

“Right now, you mean? It’s only ten.”

He didn’t answer that. He already had her in the elevator, and since the elevator only went in one direction, up, that’s where they went with it.

He took her to her door.

“Well, gunnight. See you at lunch.”

Hotel breakfasts in Europe are served privately in the room; they’d already got used to that.

She closed her door without saying good night. He hadn’t waited to hear whether she had or not, anyway.

She heard his close down the hall.

Both doors were wasted, though. She could look right through the two of them. Prime your wallet, she told him, make sure you’ve got a heavy enough load in it. Refill your cigarette case. Go over to the glass, give yourself a couple of extra strokes with the hairbrush. Now straighten your tie. Yes, you’ll do, you’ll do. You would have done for me even the way you were before, without all that. But this is Something New, Something Special.

I hope you get the Asiatic Flu from her! I hope you trip over your own shoelace and give yourself a biff right on the chin, the kind of a biff I’d like to give you for myself! I hope... (and with forehead slowly drooping against door-frame), darling, I hope you have a wonderful time from start to finish, and don’t feel like I’m feeling at this minute.

She heard him go by again later. He was whistling. His entrance music for a wonderful evening ahead. One of the old things from the Twenties, Tonight’s my Night with Baby.

She went to the window overlooking the front of the hotel.

She saw him come out below her, and there was someone on his arm. She must have stopped by for him and waited downstairs.

Someone in trailing black velvet and a shawl of gold lace over her head. They got in a car together and drove off.

Always the same loneliness.

3

Their opening was a sensation, the biggest Milan had had in years. Even the American air raids hadn’t rocked the town so.

“La Danza dell’ Morte” it said on every billboard, every kiosk, every wall, and somebody had added the cute idea of a prancing skeleton.

People stood up on chairs. They waved handkerchiefs wildly, and napkins — and in one case even an entire tablecloth. They broke up the place, it was through for the night. It wasn’t a night club any more, it was a mob scene. A woman was pushed through a mirror, and she had to go to the hospital, but she went in evening dress and still holding a bottle of champagne cradled in her arms, and she didn’t need any anaesthetic when they took the stitches, she was so high already. She was still applauding as the doctors sewed up her shoulder, and they thought it was for them (they hadn’t been to the Excelsior) and bowed and thanked her.

Mari had to fight her way through to the street. Luckily, Sertuchi had policemen there to clear a way, or it would have been la danza dell’ morte in plain fact. It took her car a good fifteen minutes to make the few short yards from the club’s side entrance to the next corner, and even after it was in the clear they still had to pull a few admirers off its roof. She emerged from the side entrance holding two dozen full-blown roses. When she entered her car all she was holding was two dozen stark stems, not even a leaf left on them. Not even a thorn, for that matter. The sidewalk was maybe four yards wide.

It was a scene such as a performer dreams of, dreams of and seldom gets.

They all went out to celebrate afterwards. All of them. Every one but him.

He said he’d come along in a few minutes. He didn’t. The few minutes became a lot.

She turned her head too much. The wrong way, away from the celebration. She asked the time too much.

She saw Dixon smile at Clark, and then Clark smile back at Dixon.

She didn’t have to ask where he was any more after that; she’d already been told.

He never came from first to last.

She went home early. Early for an opening night celebration.

She knocked on his door when she got back, but she really didn’t expect any answer. She didn’t get any.

Always the same loneliness.

4

They didn’t have dinner together the next night.

He showed up only minutes before the performance, all lit up like a hundred-watt bulb. Not from alcohol, it wasn’t that kind of lighting.

He threw her a “How’s the star?” from the dressing-room door.

The star was lonely.

Then he came in, kissed her, went out and again. A kiss of partnership, one of those things.

The shine of him hurt her eyes. She had to close them for a moment after he’d gone. Too bright.

They didn’t have dinner together the next night.

They didn’t have dinner together the next—

They didn’t have dinner together—

They didn’t—

She was walking along the Via San Andrea in the bright afternoon sunshine and she saw him sitting there out in the open at a table.

He had his back to her, he didn’t see her. Then the forward-bending waiter got out of the way, and she saw that he wasn’t alone. There were two at the table. Two of everything. Two little glasses of Carpano. Two cigarettes kissing tip to tip in a dish. Sunshine for two. A little world just for two.

Even just two hands on the table, one for each. Where the other two were wasn’t hard to guess. They were nowhere in sight.

She was very pretty. One of those rarities, an Italian blonde. There are a few in the north. One too many in the north, one too many!

Mari would have turned around and backed away, but it was too late. She was hemmed in by little tables, little glasses of Cinzano, little chairs.

All of a sudden he turned around and saw her.

“Hello, Mari.”

“Hello, Max.”

He stood up. He didn’t blush or act confused. Just acted a little wary, as if to say, “You won’t stay too long, now, will you?”

“Miss Ruyter, the Signorina Malatesta.”

She thought, What would you do if I corrected that ‘Miss’ part? But he knew he was safe. She knew he was too.

“The signorina’s in Italian films,” he said. Proudly, as though he not only already owned her, he owned Italian films as well. She wouldn’t have minded if it was only Italian films he owned.

“How wonderful you dance, Miss Ruyter.”

“Thank you. Were you there?”

“I go every night while I am in Milano.”

“To see me dance?”

“Well, partly that.” Her eyes gave her away, they smiled over his way.

“Oh, I see,” she said. She did. She saw.

He pretended to reach for a chair.

She wouldn’t take it.

He tried to buy her a drink.

She wouldn’t let him.

The Italian tried to be generous, or charming or something. Or maybe she really didn’t guess. “We must find a, how you say, a cavalier, a gentleman escort, for Miss Ruyter, to show her Milano. It is not fair. I have shown it to you, caro mio. Someone should show it to Miss Ruyter.”

“I’ve seen a lot of it from my hotel window,” Mari told her, “and I’m getting to know it by heart from there.”

“You must run, Miss Ruyter?”

He was the one spoke for her. He wasn’t taking any chances. “She has an evening performance coming on. You know how it is.”

You do too, mister, she thought bitterly. And even I do, for that matter. That makes three of us that do. They didn’t have dinner together that night.

5

When the hour hand had finally caught up with the minute hand, and there was just one hand instead of two any more, three-fifteen in the morning, she got up and went over to the window and looked out. A lot of stars flashed up outside, as though somebody had sent up a shower of sparks.

Somebody else’s stars.

“Take five,” she told them moodily. “You’re wasting your time, wrong window.”

She slapped it shut in their faces.

She opened the door and left the room, just the way she was. Wrapper over nylon gown.

She went down the hall to his room. She didn’t knock. She knew he wasn’t in there. She opened the door and went in. She closed it and put on the lights.

He came around her right away — that was what she’d come here for. A leftover whiff from an old cigarette, a hint of bay rum from an old shave. A necktie on the floor, like the shed skin of a snake.

She picked it up, and smoothed it with her fingers, and — just once — with her lips. London, last Christmas. “Thanks, honey; I’ll think of you every time I wear it!”

“Traitor,” she said to it. “A big help you were.”

On the table, telephone messages for him. Fast and furious.

“Signorina Malatesta called. 17.40”

“Signorina Malatesta called. 18.00”

“Signorina Malatesta called. 18.20”

European time; in the States they called it two-time.

She went over to the closet door and nestled up against a pendant jacket. She twined the sleeves around her, where they should have known enough to go of their own accord.

She got him, she thought, and I got his old jacket.

Only the dam thing doesn’t hold you tight enough; you have to work for the two of you. A flannel hug, not a muscle in it.

The room door opened without any warning. He was standing there looking at her.

He was a little soused.

“Mari, you oughtn’t to come into a fellow’s room like this. It looksh like hell.”

“I’m sorry, I wouldn’t want to tarnish your reputation, Max.”

“No, it ain’t that. Ish yours.”

Malatesta’s lips were on his left jaw. And on his right jaw. And crosswise over a corner of his own lips. And on his chin.

She gently wiped a pair or two of them off.

“Did you worry just as much about hers, when you were with her just now?”

So then he remembered where he’d been just now. His eyes lit up. But it was indirect current, not for her.

“Wow!” he exploded.

That gave her the picture. It had been all the way, no brakes on.

She moved toward the door.

“Good night, Max,” she said softly.

She looked down at the knob. Then she turned and looked back at him.

“Is she very beautiful, Max?”

She didn’t have to ask that, she’d seen her; but she wanted him to say. He said.

“She puts my eyes out. Man, she’s walking blindness.”

“Are her arms very soft when they go around you, Max?”

She went back toward him, to show him, for purposes of comparison.

“Not only that, but educated.”

Her own dropped as though a whip had been laid across them.

He watched her go back to the door again, and open it. Something had finally penetrated to his Clicquot-dipped senses. A little something, anyway. A very little.

“Hey, you know something? I think you’re lonely. I think you need somebody to love.”

“No thanks, Max,” she answered wanly, in a small, small voice. “I already have.”

She closed the door after her.

6

A long ominous chord. And the lights started going down. Then abruptly a spotlight, like a sack of flour bursting open on the dance floor.

Standing there waiting, she looked out ahead of her.

Hundreds of faces, palely powdered by the spotlight. Hundreds of stilled breaths.

She could see him now. Malatesta was with him, wearing diamonds on her fingers. They were at one of the ringside tables.

Sertuchi was out in the spotlight now, making her introduction. He did that for her himself. An introduction she still couldn’t understand most of, because it was in Italian.

And then his voice went up, the way it always did at the end. “...la danza dell’ morte!”

And then he cued her with his hand, and she came swiftly out from the darkness, and suddenly was in the spotlight.

Malatesta wasn’t looking at her (she’d seen this dance so many times before), she was looking at him.

Mari found that the flat, spade-like head of the symbolic snake was darting outward, more and more, in the direction of that table at which the other woman sat, rather than hovering downward over her own head. It was at though she could not control it. She had drawn nearer to the table than she usually approached any individual table other nights; she was off-center on the floor. But her feet wouldn’t seem to carry her back. She could feel a hot rancor, that was as much like venom as the snake’s own, coursing through her body.

She kept willing death, thinking it, wishing it.

She wanted to kill her; she wanted to see her fall.

Strike out! Strike out there! That way! There!

A little of the spotlight washed over Malatesta, and she suddenly stood out in all her Florentine, blonde loveliness. Malatesta was looking at her now, tautly. She wasn’t looking at Jones any more.

Eyes wide with horror. One hand clutching at her breast. She saw her raise the other, and make the sign of the cross with it.

Mari prepared for the fall. There were no steps here, and it was difficult to do.

Malatesta’s hand still clutched her breast. She was trembling violently. The jewelry on her showed that. Liquid ripples coursed through it, from the vibrations of her body.

Mari fell and lay there, one outstretched arm pointed straight before her at Malatesta’s table.

There were the usual screams and gasps. She got them every night. The back of a chair cracked in overturn, and something heavy dropped to the floor nearby.

She wouldn’t open her eyes.

It has struck her, she gloated. It has struck her. She is dead. It has killed her.

The room was in an uproar now. She could tell people were milling about, by the shuffling sound their shoes made, to and fro. She could tell they were scarcely looking at her any more, something else had their full attention.

She raised her head and looked.

Malatesta and he were clasped together in palpitating embrace, her blonde head gouging into his shoulder. Those ripples were still coursing down her jewelry, from the tremors of her body.

Behind them, in a straight line that passed through her table from the dance floor, the body of a man lay on the floor, mouth open as if in protest at the swiftness of his own death.

7

Toward three o’clock that same morning there was a knock on the door of her room at the hotel.

“Si?” she called out.

“Aperta.” It was a man’s voice. It was authoritative.

“Un momento,” she complained wanly.

Two men were standing one on each side of it, when she’d reached it and opened it. They were unsmiling, in a land where everyone smiled all the time (everyone but she). Their liquid black eyes were as hard, as impersonal, as little lumps of coal. One was in police uniform.

The other took something out of his coat, but she didn’t look at the credentials.

“I am Russo, of the metropolitan police.”

He didn’t ask her who she was, nor if she was.

“You are coming down with us to the central headquarters.”

She didn’t pretend not to understand.

“About what happened before?”

“That is correct.”

She had never seen an Italian detective before. She had never even thought of one before. But if she had, he would, most likely, have been totally different from what this one was. No excitability, no florid gestures. Why did they have that reputation, as a race? This one was stolid. Cold as stone. Unemotional as steel. Less human, more of a machine, than even a London or a New York plain-clothesman might have been.

He spoke English. He must have studied it long and hard, at some lyceum.

He had on a light-gray flannel suit, and a gray hat.

He gave the impression of being an extremely competent young man, whom it would be wiser not to fool around with. You not only wouldn’t get anywhere, you’d get decidedly the worst of it if you got him started.

“I am arrested?” she faltered.

“You are not arrested,” he said clippedly. “I would have informed you if you were.”

He acted as if he found this typical layman’s question a nuisance, as if he got it all the time and were sick of answering it. The policeman didn’t even show signs of life, just stood by.

“Can I — just get my purse, and wrap something around my head? It gets chilly at this hour of the night.”

“Make whatever preparation you wish. Only do not close the door between us.”

“I wasn’t going to,” she said meekly.

She twisted a scarf about her head into a turban and joined them.

On the way down the hall she said, “Did I do the wrong thing by coming back here? Nobody told me to stay there.”

“It is not important, Madama,” he let her know curtly, “since you are returning now anyway with me.”

They had kept the elevator waiting for them. It was the first time since she’d been stopping at the hotel that she, or anyone else for that matter, had received immediate service from it.

As they descended, she kept saying to herself, I won’t ask him. I won’t ask him.

“Will — Mr. Jones be there too?”

“He has been,” he said tersely. “The greater part of the night.”

They went out through the lobby, and she tried not to be aware of the stares of the night clerk and the night porter.

On the steps just outside the entrance she stopped short in dismay.

“Not in that?”

It was a van. Backed up, and with its rear doors yawning open.

“We cannot send a private car for each person, Madama,” he answered curtly. “There are not enough of them at our disposal.”

She glanced around her embarrassedly, before descending and stepping inside. “It’s good it’s this late, there’s nobody much around at this hour.”

He supported her by the arm, and guided her before him to a seat. Then sat down opposite her.

The policeman closed the doors on them, then stayed outside on the rear step.

“I’ve never been in a police van before,” she said in a very small voice.

“It is just another machine, Madama.”

“But it’s so dark in here. And you can’t see out.”

“They are not built to be looked out of, Madama,” he said without too much sympathy. “They are not tourist omnibuses.”

She was fumbling in her handbag. She gave a mild exclamation of disappointment.

“I forgot my cigarettes — back at the room. I guess I wasn’t so calm and collected as I pretended to be.”

“Madama,” he said immediately, but in that tight, impersonal voice of his, and held his own out toward her. She could make out the white of the package, that was how she knew where to reach for one.

His lighter winked fitfully between them for a moment. He didn’t take one himself. (He was on a job.) His dark glistening eyes went out again.

“Grazie,” she said, trying to veer over into Italian to thaw things out a little.

He wouldn’t quit English. This was going to be kept impersonal between them, if he could help it. He’d picked her up in English, and he was going to turn her in English. “For nothing, Madama,” he said, from the other side of the Alps.

She puffed smoke. “Why do you keep calling me Madama?” She wondered if Jones had told them yet. If he’d have to.

“I am used to using it,” he said. “It comes to my tongue quicker than the correct English words, ‘mees’ and ‘meestress’. They always hold me up; I have to think which is which.”

Not mistress, she corrected him to herself. But yet, I’d settle even for that — gladly. “You take many women into custody?”

“You are not in custody, mad—”

She laughed. “Now we’ve both made a mistake; that makes us even.”

He didn’t laugh with her. She would have heard it if he had. She knew his face had never even flickered.

She dropped her cigarette, stepped on it in the dark.

“You’re not very kind, Officer Russo,” she sighed despondently. “I’m just a little frightened, riding in this and being brought in like this, and trying hard not to show it. You might have helped me just a little.”

“I am not a governess,” he answered stonily. “I am a civil-clothes police agent.”

“God help the girl you love, if there is one,” she slurred rapidly, half to herself.

“There is,” he answered frigidly. “And you are not she.”

And on that amiable note the ride ended.

The Milan headquarters building was centuries-old, and drab, and thick-walled, and like all public buildings in Italy, chilly and cavernous on the inside. It would have been gloomy and depressing even in broad daylight, but at this advanced hour of the night it was like entering a tomb to go in there. She shuddered and hugged her own sides as they entered.

“I should have brought something warmer.”

No answer.

They went down long corridors, poorly lit and draughty as the cutting edges of razor blades.

“Through this door, miss.”

(I bet he’s been rehearsing the right word to use ever since we got out of the van.)

Malatesta was in the first room they came to, waiting for Max.

She turned and saw Mari and her escort. “This is stupid, Mees Ruyter! But is this not stuppid? My poor Mox, half the night in there! And tonight we have an invitation to go to a party they are giving, specially for us. What will they think, those people? What shall we tell them? Oh, I tell you, I am ashame’ for to be an Italian at all!”

But never a word of sympathy for Mari herself. They went on in and the door closed. There was a man at a desk.

“Have a seat, Miss Ruyter. We will be ready for you in a moment.”

Jones was there, on a chair against the wall. Hunched forward in a sort of dejected vacuity, forearms projecting way out past his knees, cravanette topcoat in a puddle on his lap, fiddling with the expensive Swiss wristwatch he’d bought himself since they’d been here. Showing, if nothing else, how the time was on his mind. It had about everything on it: the minutes, the seconds, the date, the day of the week. Everything but one thing: when he was going to get out of here and go to that party, with her.

For the first time since Russo had knocked on her door, she found she didn’t mind being detained quite as much as she’d thought she had. Just as long as he was also being detained along with her. Kept from that party.

He corrugated his forehead ruefully as he saw her come in, and gave her a moody nod. As if to say, “What d’you think of this? Isn’t it great?”

She tried to veer over toward him and sit down on the chair next to him. The man at the desk didn’t raise his eyes at all. “Over on this side of the room, Miss Ruyter.” His hand went out.

She had to go all the way across to the far wall and sit down by that.

He looked over at her, Jones, from where he was, and she looked over at him, from where she was.

She took out a little mirror from her handbag, to see what she looked like to him. How her chances were now.

Suddenly, without any warning, without the man at the desk raising his head, or looking her way, or anything else, the questioning was already under way, she was a whole question behind in it.

“You have ever had this happen before?”

“I said to you, you have ever had this happen before?”

“Oh, excuse me, I didn’t know you were talking to — I don’t understand you.”

Russo took over. “The question is plain enough, miss.

What Inspector Gentile is asking is, did anyone ever fall dead, pass away like this, during one of your former performances?”

She didn’t know if she should tell them this. Had Jones? If he had already, then there was no choice. But if he hadn’t, and they still didn’t know about it, why...?

“You do not wish to answer, Miss Ruyter?” Gentile again.

That was making it look bad.

“Oh, I do. I do.”

“Very well, then, do.”

“It happened in Montreal, at the Club Perroquet, on — on St. Catherine Street; that was back two seasons ago.” They nodded.

Just like the police, they d already known it anyway. And she’d spoiled it by hesitating.

“And?”

“And in New York, about — about a month before that. It was just a rehearsal — No, not even a rehearsal; I was auditioning for our — for our agent.”

They nodded again.

Just like the police—

She felt very guilty of something, and couldn’t make out what it was. She looked down at the floor. Very guilty, almost criminal.

“You had ever seen this man before?”

She had to come back again to where she was. I’d make a rotten suspect. If I ever really did do anything, I’d be sunk in no time. “The man at the table?”

“What other man would you say we are talking about?”

“I not only never saw him before, I didn’t even see him there after he was already at the table.” It was true; she had been looking at Malatesta the entire time. “The first time I saw him, he was already on the floor.”

“You are married, Miss Ruyter?”

Now what’ll I do? Adroitly, her eyes went past Jones. They didn’t stop there, just went by. They brushed across his eyes like a kiss.

He gave the ghost of all winks. Never had an eyelid moved so slightly. Never had it moved so unmistakably.

Because she is out there, in the very next room, and might hear about it afterwards.

She looked down at the floor. Then she looked up at the inspector. “I am the wife of nobody. I am nobody’s wife at all.”

It was the truth. Nothing had ever been truer.

“You are infuriated about something, Miss Ruyter?” They must have caught it on her face.

“I was infuriated for a moment,” she admitted with charming candor, “at the thought that I am not married. It just came to me now. All we women are that way—” Suddenly the door had opened, and a young woman was in the room, accompanied by one of Russo’s fellow-agents. For a mistaken instant, as she started to turn her head, she thought it would be Malatesta, but it wasn’t, it was someone entirely different.

The entry must have been by prearrangement. There had been no knock, no signal or summons from Gentile at the desk.

She was heavily veiled, and already in full mourning-black. It must have been at hand from some previous occasion, to be donned so quickly. The little puckers her veil made, near the mouth, showed that she was’ still weeping behind it, if silently.

She had no eyes for the men. She stared hard at Mari. Remorselessly hard, protractedly. Her gloved hand, finally, went up toward her own headgear.

“Take off the wrap you have about your hair, Miss Ruyter,” Gentile requested.

She undid the turban-arrangement in which she’d come to Headquarters.

The veil stirred sibilantly. She was saying something to her detective-escort. He went over to Gentile. Gentile beckoned Mari, held up his desk phone toward her.

“Say something, Miss Ruyter. Say something into this telephone. Speak into it.”

“But what shall I—?” She took it from him, put it toward her ear. “Hello? How are you—?”

He sliced his hand. “No. No. Say something in Italian.”

“But I don’t speak Italian. I’ve only been in Milan—”

Again the veil stirred with some delphic message. The detective brought it over. Gentile jotted it down on a blank card, handed that to Mari. “Say this,” he ordered. “Say it over three times. And say it slowly each time. And clearly.”

She picked up the card, she read from it into the telephone, “Pronto? La casa di signor Cortese? Chi parla?” She said it three times.

She put down the phone.

She looked around, and the veiled figure was gone. “Look, Inspector—” Jones protested in a querulous drawl, as if wearied beyond the point of endurance.

“Silenzio.” He turned to her. “It was not your voice, who has been calling up this man at his house. That was his older daughter, who just made the comparison.”

“You seriously thought that I...?”

He spread his palms. “It had to be proved, no? That is what we are for, we.” He glanced over a paper. “This man was Giulio Cortese, manufacturer, aged fifty-two. A widower, with two grown daughters. An adventuress, a woman of mystery, came into his life, so the daughters say. They only saw her with him once, in the distance. Fortunately, she does not resemble you. She called up his house many times, and they heard her voice. Fortunately, it is not the same as yours. They objected to his marrying her, in order to protect the — the, how you say it? the legacy which will come to them some day, the rights of inheritance to his money. They succeed’ in dissuading him. He broke off. The woman foun’ out the reason. She sent this man at least one threatening letter, that they saw with their own eyes. They admitted to me privately they intercept’ much of his correspondence with her, in order to quicken up the breaking-off. And two week ago, a box of crystallize’ fruit came to their house, with no name they think by mistake. They have a little poodle. He get hold of one, he die in two hours.”

She was speechless. She felt as you do when a sharp-edged axe or some other lethal blade has fallen from above you and just missed your head by fractions of inches. That cool, quivery, astringent feeling.

“There is just one more formality to be completed, and then—” As he spoke, the telephone she had used for a sounding-board before began to peal in a tinkling falsetto. He listened carefully, said a word or two, then nodded and replaced it.

“You can go now,” he said. “The autopsy has just been completed. Cortese died of an acute heart attack.” He stared hard at her. “For which you are morally responsible, if not criminally. Your dance frightened him to death.”

They both jumped heatedly to their feet at once, she and Jones.

“If you had not danced in front of his table tonight, he would still be alive.”

He slapped his hand down on the desk.

“It is too dangerous, and I will not permit it any more. Your permit will be revoked, and I will take it up to the proper authorities, so that you are asked to leave Italy at the earliest opportunity.”

“You’re deporting us?” Jones glared at him as if he were going to take a flying broad-jump across the desk at him.

She quickly edged him aside, and turned the door. “Don’t — you’ll only make it worse.”

“You don’t have to deport us!” Jones brayed at him. “We’ll take the first train out — and the first boat! We wouldn’t stay here if you—”

“Good,” said Gentile drily. “Do it that way, then. It will save a great deal of telegraph-forms and official paperwork.”

Jones thrust her almost roughly out of the room before him, as though she were some kind of a puppet, and slammed the door on him. On the other side of it he instantly forgot her existence, while he tied himself up into a four-arm knot with Malatesta, told her all his troubles, and she in turn stroked back his hair, smoothed down his lapels, and otherwise consoled him and condoled with him. Love can be so exclusive.

They turned around and saw her, then, so then they remembered her. Remembered she was there with them.

“Give you a lift back to the hotel, Mari?” he wanted to know.

“No thanks,” she said. “I’ll be all right.” And walked on out.

8

She was back in her own room now.

She sat down at her dressing-table mirror to attend to her face, as though she were going out.

She was.

She put on a little powder.

“All this is for someone else,” She said to him. “I have another date now. I could never get one with you. But I have one with someone else now. Someone who is not so hard-to-get. You would not be jealous. His kisses are so cold. His eyes are so hollow. But once you’ve dated him, at least he never throws you over.”

She put on a little scent. It was called Je serai libre ce soir.

She opened the night-stand drawer. She took out the little bottle. She poured a glassful of water from the bedside pitcher and stood it there. She uncapped the bottle and took the cotton out of its neck.

No more tomorrow nights. They never came anyway.

She put two of the little pellets into her mouth, drank a swallow of water.

She waited a moment. Then she lighted a cigarette. She put that down on a small glass tray within reach.

She put two more into her mouth. Drank another swallow of water.

Then she smoked quietly for another moment.

Two more, and another swallow of water.

Suddenly she emptied out all that remained in the bottle into the hollow of her hand, held that to her mouth, swallowed convulsively a few times.

She drank several swallows of water in succession, and it was all over. As simple as that.

She poked the cigarette out. She dropped the little empty bottle into the wastebasket.

That was all there was to it. No more than that.

The world tiptoed away, as if trying not to wake her.

“Keep walking, keep walking, don’t stop for a moment,” the doctor warned Max. “A moment is all that is needed...” He made a pass with his hand to indicate ‘finished’.

“Hold your arm around me tighter, Max,” she mumbled, half audibly.

“Not too tight. She must breathe,” the doctor cautioned.

“You mind your own business,” she tried to snap at him, but the snap was all limp.

“Where we going, Max?”

“Taking a little walk.”

He kissed her.

“Don’t do that again!” the doctor cried out sharply. “It makes her close her eyes. It relaxes her.”

She tried to turn her face expectantly toward Max, but no more kisses. Doctor’s orders.

“You can stop now,” the doctor said, after listening intently all over her chest. “It is safe. She will live.”

Ah, who wants that? she protested to herself...

A morning in bed. The nurse sitting there in a chair, but without him.

“Where is he?”

The nurse was obtuse. “The gentleman from last right?”

That was about right.

“Yes,” she said bitterly, “the gentleman from last right.”

“He worked very hard to save you.” The nurse looked at her curiously. “You know him?”

“Yes,” she said. “I know him from a distance. I know him — how you say it? — by sight. I’ve seen him around.” she turned her face disgustedly the other way on the pillows.

The doctor came at noon, took her pulse. She could get up now.

The nurse left.

The doctor bowed, and prepared to leave.

“Momento. My handbag is over there somewhere—”

The doctor raised a denying palm. “That has been arranged. The young man will pay the bill. He will pay for everything.”

Her eyes narrowed to slits of malevolent promise. “He will, dottore,” she assured him. “You can say that again. And again, and again. He will pay for everything, is right. And not from here—” She touched herself where a man’s pocket is supposed to be. “But from ’way up here.” She put her finger against her nose for a moment. “In currency of brightest red.”

The doctor shrugged. “Non capisco inglese.”

“It’s the same in any language, in any language. Payment through the nose.”

“You feel good. I can see,” the doctor said. “Your eyes, they blaze so.”

“I don’t feel at all. And that’s what’s good about it. The part you feel with, that got left behind. You saved me, doctor. But there’s one part of me you didn’t pull through. My heart. From now on, I go on without it.

“I’m going to hurt him the way he’s hurt me,” she promised, grimly joyful. “And when we’re even, and he’s all paid up, then I’m going back to the beginning, and I’m going to start in all over again hurting him, from scratch, just for good measure. I’m going to see him bleed, and I’m going to see him writhe, and I’m going to plant my foot right in the middle of his heart, and push down hard the way you step on a caterpillar.”

The doctor looked at her dubiously. She was like a volcano priming for an eruption.

The compartment door opened. Everything repeated itself. Only nothing ever does; it fools you. His polka dots were blowing in the other direction, over the left shoulder. He came in and closed the door after him.

“How’s it?” he said.

“How’s it,” she said back.

Just two casuals in a railway compartment. Two business associates.

“Sit down for a minute?”

“Lots of room.”

He took a look at the perambulating poplars. A church-spire had got meshed in with them, and was being carried along. “Well, I’m not sorry to see that place go.”

“I left my heart there.”

He gave her a look.

She didn’t tell him what she meant. She just said it a second time, more grimly inflexible than before. “I left my heart there.”

Four

Buenos Aires: Ta-Ba-Ris

1

Then the applause, crashing like an artillery bombardment. Shouts and bravos, people stamping their feet and beating their tables, people standing up in their seats drinking ecstatic toasts to her. Sometimes flowers fell into the glaring spotlight pool, and lay there quivering as though they were in actual water. Gardenias, white roses, carnations jerked from buttonholes, orchids pulled from someone else’s shoulder. Flowers from the living to the dead.

Not just applause in a night club. Hysteria.

In the wings her eyes open. But he carries her still further, out into the dressing-room alley. There he sets her down upon her feet, but holds her for a moment longer, until he is sure she has regained her balance.

Then he takes his arms away, and she glances down as if to say, “Did they have to stay that long?”

Then he takes his handkerchief and gently touches her face with it. She slants her face aside, and that stops the attention.

Then he drops to one knee and with the same handkerchief attempts to brush away any dust she may have gathered when she threw herself down on the floor.

She gives him a slight push, a disdainful flick with the back of her hand. “I have a maid, you know. My maid will do that.”

He rises slowly, crestfallen.

She turns and leaves him there. “Good night,” she dismisses him coldly.

She reaches the door of her dressing room — hers, not theirs; his is down at the other end of the alley — and puts her hand on the knob.

He calls her and comes after her, and stands beside her once more. “Mari.” And then he doesn’t seem to know what to say after all.

“Was there something you wanted to say to me?” she asks, icily polite.

“I don’t suppose tonight either—” he falters.

“Tonight either, what?”

“I don’t suppose it’s any use asking, if you’d come to some little confiteria with me, and have a cup of coffee—” He gestures involvedly. “You and me, just us, together.”

“Every night since we’ve been in Buenos Aires you’ve asked me that. And every night I’ve said no. We’ve been here four and a half weeks now. That’s thirty-one nights you’ve asked me that. That’s thirty-one nights I’ve said no. What made you think I would say yes tonight?”

He doesn’t answer that.

“You are very tedious, Mr. Jones. You are also a little stupid, I think. Thirty-one times no means no.”

“But everyone makes a mistake in their arithmetic once in awhile,” he says forlornly. “Even accountants, even bookkeepers. Why can’t you?”

“I don’t like coffee—”

Her eyes stab at him.

“I don’t like confiterias—”

They knife right through him.

“And I don’t like—”

They leave him cut to ribbons and bleeding all over.

“Me, I guess,” he shrivelled.

“—being wheedled in backstage alleys for contributions to charity. Every night, regularly, for five minutes, you spoil my whole evening; then I have to get back into a good mood again.”

“Ouch,” he winced. Then, “Don’t you remember me at all? Don’t you remember, we were once married, just outside New York harbor?”

“I’ve signed many contracts. I remember them all. In fact, I have them all put away, in my safe-deposit box at the bank, at this very moment. I signed a paper with Sertuchi, at the Excelsior in Milan, but that doesn’t mean I should go out with him. I signed a paper with — what was his name? — in Montreal, but I wasn’t expected to go around with him. I signed a paper with you.” She rolled her shoulders elaborately.

“It was a little different, wasn’t it?”

“Not even as good. No pay whatever. No limit to the engagement. And no escape clause.”

“‘Escape clause’? That’s a fine way to talk about a marriage.”

“So what’s marriage but a dancing engagement? Only you dance for one man. And he doesn’t even clap his hands to show a little appreciation.”

“Let’s start the discussion over,” he pleaded. “I got lost along the way. All right, I won’t be a husband. Just let me be a — a married admirer, a legal sweetheart. Won’t you give me one night? There must be one night you haven’t an engagement.”

She nodded matter-of-factly. “You’re right, there is. I have no engagement for Friday the thirteenth. Jorge is so superstitious; he purposely won’t come near me that night.”

“But that’s three weeks from yesterday!”

“I didn’t say you could have even that. You’re getting ahead of yourself. You said there must be one night I had free, and I said there was. But giving it to you, that’s another matter. My nights are too good, why should I throw them away?”

“Oh, murder,” he half-sobbed. “Couldn’t you leave your knife out of me in one place, at least. You make me hurt all over.”

“I don’t stick knives in you,” she told him with supreme indifference. “For Pete’s sake, what do I want with pork?”

“What can I do to please you?”

She considered this with momentary earnestness. “I don’t know. Stay over on the other side of the city when I’m on this side, I suppose.”

“You gave my candy to the doorman.”

“I shouldn’t have been so careless. I remember now, he stayed away from his post two nights in succession right after that. He’s a lovable old man, I wouldn’t want to contaminate him for the world.”

“You gave my flowers to the hospital.”

“Power of suggestion, purely and simply. They reminded me of the ill. Because they made me slightly sick myself.”

“You gave my perfume to your maid.”

“She has such cheap taste in perfume. It seemed to be just the thing for her.”

“You sent the diamond watch-bracelet back to the jewelers I ordered it from. But in such a way. And with a message with it. So that the whole store, the whole staff, were laughing at me behind the back of their hands when I went in to find out what had happened about it. And from there, the story spread all over town.”

“Why, I only said to tell you that I knew the time already. And since you weren’t going any place with me, and I wasn’t going any place with you, I really didn’t need to know it any more closely than I did already.”

“Look,” he pleaded abjectly, throwing both arms out. “What do you want?”

“To go inside and get this makeup off, and not stand wrangling outside my dressing-room door with — some somebody or other.”

“There must be something you want. There must be some way I can get to you. Some way I can get in close to you. I’ll buy you all of Buenos Aires.”

She looked him up and down, from foot to head, and down to foot again. “I already have it. Didn’t you know? Ask Jorge — I mean young Señor Carralda — about that.” He started to rub one shoulder as though it ached. “Do you really get this much kick out of seeing someone squirm? I swear you must have a cruel streak in you somewhere. Did you used to pull the wings off flies when you were a little girl? Did you used to like to step on worms and scuff your foot around?”

“Apparently there was one of each I missed. No, now don’t start grabbing for my arms. I must go. I’ve given you a lot of time tonight. I don’t know why; I must feel compassionate or something. Coming over, now that I recall, I gave a ragged little newsboy a lift from outside my apartment nearly all the way here to the club, so that he could sell his papers better. It’s been one of those days with me; I get them every now and then.”

“I’m a newsboy too,” he murmured. “Help me sell my papers.”

“Sorry,” she smiled, “I read all your news years ago. You’re just loaded with back numbers.” She managed to insert the door in between them, narrow as the snare was. He just looked at her.

“Good night, Mr. Jones. Thank you for your work tonight. Until tomorrow night at eleven; here, as usual.” The door gave the impression of hitting him square in the eyes. It didn’t, actually, but his eyes were so close to it that was the effect it gave as it fitted shut.

There was a short pause, and then, on the outside, a stunning impact suddenly sounded. It was not however on the door itself.

“Ay, que barbaridâd!” her little maid, who was in there with her, cried out sharply. “What was that? Did somebody drop a trunk out there? Look how it made all the lights shiver.

“That frightened me,” the girl said. “I come from earthquake-country, you know.”

Her mistress, totally unmoved, pinned a small towel about her own head.

The girl opened the door, reclosed it, came back more at a loss than ever. “There’s no one out there. But there’s the funniest crack running up the plaster on the wall. As though somebody kicked it with all his might. What do you suppose happened to it?”

“Maybe there was someone out there who hates walls,” her mistress shrugged. “Now get me ready. Señor will be here in a few minutes.”

2

A key nagged at the outside of her apartment door. Two silhouettes came in, along with a faint trace of Chanel Numéero Cinq and just a whiff of champagne. One turned back a moment, closed the door.

Nothing happened.

A tactful remark was made. “No, Jorge.”

Still nothing happened.

A further remark sounded. “Now, Jorge.”

Then suddenly lights shot on all over the place. The two silhouettes became an evasive figure in evening gown making swift get-away, and a frustrated one in tails coming in after her more slowly with unhappy mien.

Jorge shrugged. “But you asked me to come up with you.”

“For a nightcap. But that is not what a nightcap is. You don’t nibble at a nightcap, you sip it.”

Jorge looked crestfallen, but willing to learn.

She relented, came back toward him, guided him slightly, on the bias. “Here. See this chair? Now can I trust you to remain quiet for a few minutes? I want to get out of this Christmas tree, it’s beginning to get on my nerves. Here are your cigarettes, on this side of you. Here are all the ingredients for a nightcap, on this side of you. If you want to play yourself a little tune, there is the piano. If you want somebody else to do it for you, just turn that little dial and you will get New York on the short wave. I know; I tried it myself last night.” She patted him three times, once on the knee, once on the shoulder, and once on the top of the head; the last time, just snatched her hand back in time. “Now behave. Stay that way. Ah! — Ah! Down, don’t move. Estate quieto.”

She went over to one of the inner doors. “Good night.”

“But?”

“You will see a different Mari in a few moments. Say good night to this one. You will not see her any more tonight.”

“Good night, Mari,” he said docilely. “Send your other one out to me soon.”

She closed the door.

It finally reopened, but in no great hurry. It reopened after some twenty minutes. By his nerves it must have been forty. His nightcap glass was twice empty, or maybe three times, six cigarettes had been cut down to ash, and he was seated at the keyboard — after having done everything else there was possible to do in the room (alone) — running over it with one hand and humming hopefully under his breath the well-known local lyrics that went

Y todo a media Iuz, crepusculo interior,

Cual suave teiciopelo, la media luz de amor.

This in a room that was as bursting with light as a fireworks-factory going up in flames!

He left the piano so fast the depressed keys hadn’t even had time to spring back into place yet. Anyone would have.

The new Mari was in time to the point of an accidental intrusion complete with screams. But she didn’t, she only smiled hospitably.

She wore a nightrobe that seemed to hang in two separate pieces, the two halves of it took so long getting together. It locked the stable long after the horse had been stolen. Over this an inconsequential negligee, that seemed to cling to her only so long as you didn’t breathe on it. Her hair was down. In fact, the cards were down altogether.

She held him transfixed for several additional moments, by walking away from him at a tangent. All he could do was just turn slowly where he stood, nailed down. But the nail was going to come out any minute, he was working at it with both feet and most of the rest of him.

“There is too much light in the room, don’t you think so?”

Jorge thought so; he nearly broke his neck, the rapidity with which he nodded his head.

“I don’t like glaring rooms.”

Jorge didn’t either; his head swung from side to side now in agreement, one-hundred-twenty revolutions per minute.

She touched a switch in a strategic place and some lights went out.

Jorge offered to help, making for an axial lamp that was the worst offender of the lot.

“No, let’s leave that one on,” she said unpredictably.

She accidentally struck the shade of the one in question so that it tilted on one side. Instead of being cast decorously downward, the light now splashed itself across the windows in an enormous whitewashed bleach. As though somebody had run up a movie screen on that side of the room.

Jorge wasn’t interested in cinematographic effects at the moment. He held out his arms toward her, breathing Latin endearments.

She didn’t seem to see them.

She strolled slowly across the room, until her silhouette had climbed halfway up the center window, which was the main one of the three. She stopped there. Then she turned toward him, then she smiled at him.

That was all. That was enough.

In a moment his own silhouette was blended with hers, and they were all tangled up.

He took time out to breathe, presently. A little of where he was came back to him; not much, just a little.

“Why not sit on the sofa? Why stand over here like this?”

“I like it better here, where I’m standing.”

She looked over his shoulder at the window, as if to make sure her own profile was in the right place, opposite his. Then she let her head go languidly back, and his followed it over and down, until it had caught up with it.

When they had straightened up again, Jorge had to do some more breathing. He had to, bad.

She disengaged herself gently. The two silhouettes, following this master-plan, did so likewise.

She murmured something to herself in English, a language he was not familiar with. “I’ll take a chance.”

“What, amada?”

“Just a minute. This hairdo is hampering me. I want to make myself more informal—” Her eyelids made him promises, “—for you,” she concluded softly.

She warded him off with a slight lift of one palm. The hand that did it was held low between them, so low it missed being screened on the window.

Then it and its mate climbed to her head, took a thing or two away, and her hair came down with a rolling surge. On the window it was even more dramatic, if anything, than in the original.

Then she put her hand, first to one shoulder, then to the other, and gave them each a peculiar, downward stroking motion. Almost as if she were lowering something, stripping something down. Nothing came down — she didn’t stroke hard enough for that — but the effect was much the same; that of a person baring her shoulders.

The effect on Jorge was much the same too. It was like poking a match at dynamite. He scissored his arms wildly at her like a gardener trying to trim a hedge with a pair of unmanageable shears. She avoided them and retired deeper into the room, temporarily siphoning her shadow off the window. His promptly went after hers.

The window must have been even more eloquent now than it had been before.

He didn’t actually chase her, and she didn’t actually run from him; they just both kept going. She made a detour around a low-legged coffee-table, and again ended up by the window, in her former spot. Jorge rejoined her there precipitately, coming the short way across without bothering with the coffee-table. Any place she was, he wanted to be.

The two silhouettes got together again.

She raised her hand and stroked his hair, and watched her hand’s silhouette do the same thing on the window, with a curious sort of fascination.

“Bruja,” breathed Jorge huskily, and nestled his head against the curve of her shoulder. Then he started to worm his way around that.

She dropped her eyes discreetly, but not because of that. Down below, out of sight, she turned her wrist a little. It had a watch on it, the one false note in all her deshabille.

Three-eighteen. They’d been in the place fifteen minutes already. And fifteen minutes is a lot of rope to give an Argentine — if you do not want to get yourself hung in the process.

She sighed. But whether because of what Jorge was saying or what the watch was saying, could not have been determined.

Jorge’s kisses were starting to slant in a downward line now. Her face was beginning to wear an extremely worried look. She gave her wrist a little, loose shake, as you do when you want to hurry a watch up.

There was a crash like a crated automobile being dumped onto a pier, and outside in the entresol the door bounced back from its terminal wall, nearly jerked off its hinges. A topcoat-shrouded, mashed-hatted figure came floundering in, one shoulder forward in football lunge. It seemed to be aiming straight for the piano, as if to tackle that, but before it got there it came down in the middle of the luxurious drawing-room carpet, on one knee and the flats of both hands. Its hat rolled off and went on the rest of the way alone.

She gave a short, polite scream. Extremely short, and very polite, not noisy or anything.

Jorge’s head came up from its soundings. The figure also came up, from its grovel, and became a livid-faced, maniacally-grimacing Jones, belligerency expressed in every line of his body.

“Out!” he bellowed at Jorge. “Fast. While you can still make it.”

Jorge went toward him; perhaps it was only in uncomprehending inquiry, but it was the wrong direction to take. Jones swung circularly and missed. A moment later they were locked together. Jorge seemed to go from one clinch into another, but this wasn’t exactly the same kind.

“Please!” she wailed unnoticed, in the background. “Not in my apartment! I’m a new tenant here.”

They went down together. They got up together. They went out together. Jorge in front, a hand (not his own) at the slack of his coat-collar, a raised knee (also not his own) just under the turn of his back, giving him a sort of rushing ride forward.

They went out together in an unerring straight line, through entresol and gaping outer door, and passed from view, leaving a considerable current of air swirling around in their wake for several instants.

In the marble-floored corridor outside there was a brief but feverish scuffling of shoe leather, several heavy thuds, as when two full-sized bodies topple together, and finally the clashing shut of an elevator grate. Then the slow whirr of the machinery as the mechanism started to descend, whether voluntarily, due to its occupant, or involuntarily, due to outside control, it was impossible to determine.

There were imprecations in two languages, Spanish and English, running concurrently, the Spanish slowly dimming away floor by floor. The English portion made use of several extremely salty expressions that had probably never sounded inside this exclusive Argentine apartment building before.

She showed her distraction, meanwhile, by taking up a small mirror, looking at her face in it attentively, sketchily pinning up her hair once more, smoothing it back, and replacing the mirror where she’d found it.

Jones came back in, a white seam showing all around the armhole of his coat now. He reclosed the shellshocked door, turned the key in it, took it out, and carried it over to the window. He opened the window, threw the key out into the depths of Avenida Santa Fé and brushed his hands ostentatiously. “You won’t need that any more,” he said grimly.

She had gone over to the phone meanwhile, was clicking it busily.

“Oh, no you don’t!” He ran over, took the phone away from her. “I belong here, and here I stay.”

She shrugged coolly enough. “Did I say anything?”

His eyes opened and his mouth opened in company with them. His face was a lot of blank O’s. “Huh?” he said dimwittedly.

“Let me show you,” she offered. She took the phone back from him again. He was too stupefied to resist. “You can put out that lamp now,” she suggested to him parenthetically. “It’s served its purpose.”

He was too hypnotized even to do this. He just looked at it, as though he’d never seen a lamp before.

She was carrying out her original purpose on the phone, meanwhile. “This is Mari Ruyter. Don’t put any calls on here. Not all morning, not all middle-of-the-day, not all afternoon. I don’t wish to be disturbed until — oh, about seven o’clock tomorrow evening.” She looked at Jones appraisingly. He had finally gotten it through his head what a lamp was, and what you did to one to make it go out: tweaked the switch up near the top. “No, wait,” she countermanded. “I’ll make that eight o’clock instead. An hour is an hour. And when Lupita comes, you tell her for me it’s her day off. If she argues, you tell her the employer is always right.”

She had difficulty replacing the phone into its cradle; she had lost the use of both arms up to the shoulders, they were pinned as tightly to her as though she had suddenly become involved with a boa constrictor. A very adept one, with a lot of coil to it.

“Just let me get this back where it belongs,” she panted short-breathedly. “It carries sounds downstairs to him, you know.” She managed to work a little slack into one forearm, enough to drop the instrument home — from a height of about two feet. But it landed true, and the apparatus closed.

The lamp was out, and there were no shadows on the windows now. Jorge had not only taken his own silhouette with him, he had taken hers as well. It was just as well; the silhouettes couldn’t have done full justice to their originals any more, anyway. They would have had to create an outlined impression something like a sandwich on end, after it’s been run over by a twenty-ton truck.

“It took you long enough to get around to this,” she suffocated finally, when she had managed to save up enough breath for it.

“Uh?” he said brilliantly. In the dimness his face was probably a stack of O’s again.

“Don’t you suppose I knew you were down there every night watching my windows? For fifteen nights now I’ve had to give a performance in front of them, and still you didn’t have sense enough to come up and break in. Twice already Lupita has had to change the bulb in that lamp, from overwork. First to a seventy-five-watt, and all this week we’ve been using a hundred-watt. And every night the performance ran longer and grew more risky. I don’t know what I would have been able to add to it — or maybe I should say subtract — any more, after tonight. It was down to bedrock. That’s a good word for it, bedrock.

“All that good work. Thousands of dollars worth of... of my private talent. Why, Morty would have had a stroke if he’d known I was wasting it on a fifth-floor window pane, with our current engagement prices what they are! And you? All you did was kick the bases of lampposts down there—”

“How did you—?”

“I have eyes, don’t I? Don’t you suppose I noticed that slight limp you’ve been developing in one foot the last few days? You’ve been showing up at the club more and more lame each evening. I could tell your toes hurt. And the other night I caught a glimpse of you through the open door of your dressing room as I was going by. You were packing cotton around in the toe of your sock, and making all sorts of agonized faces.”

“Didn’t you feel sorry for me, suffering like that?” he whispered.

“Sorry for you! If I hadn’t had a date with Jorge, I think I would have borrowed my maid’s flatiron, gone in there with it, taken good aim when you weren’t expecting it, and let it crash-land where it would have done the most good.”

More sandwich-effects, with the bread squeezing the life out of the filling, and the filling trying to do as much for the bread.

“I told you once already tonight, Mr. Jones, and I have to say it again now. You’re very stupid.”

“And tedious you said, too.”

“That still remains to be proved.”

“And I’m just a bundle of back newspapers, remember?”

“The headlines you’re printing all over me right now couldn’t be hotter or more up-to-date.”

“Here’s one just came over the wires.”

Her neck suddenly went limp on his shoulder. “Oh, darling,” she pleaded, “let’s stop being brittle and wise. Let’s play the scene for real. There’s no one here to laugh. There’s no one here but us.”

“For real,” his lips said, finding hers. “For real... for true... like this. For ever... No more backdrop, no more make-up, no more cues.”

“I’ve loved you ever since I fell for you down those temple steps that first day I ever saw you. It came to me like that! — and never went away again, any more, after. Four years have gone by since, and I’ve watched them come and go. And each year there was someone in my way. And I’ve watched them come and go too. Josette in Paris, Malatesta in Milan—”

“I don’t remember those names; I never heard them before.”

“Four years have gone by. Where did they go? Or have they? Isn’t this just a moment afterwards, the moment afterwards that was bound to come, that I knew all along would come? Didn’t the door just slam? Aren’t we in Bradley’s cabin on the ship? Haven’t the oil-lights of the harbor just slipped below the water-line? Isn’t that the streetwalker’s big hat all covered with flowers and feathers, that Fingers borrowed to help me get away in, lying over there in the corner, where I’ve just now thrown it? Aren’t your arms around me — like this, tight, like this — the way I thought they’d be, hoped they’d be, a minute ago? That minute ago four years ago? Don’t I take your face in my hands and press my lips to it, in my love and my devotion — like I did a minute ago?”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” he pleaded.

“I didn’t want an inside-out love. It’s not supposed to come from me to you. It’s supposed to come from you to me.”

“It does. Can’t you feel it rushing all around you? Can’t you feel it pumping from my heart?”

“And I only had to wait a minute for it. That wasn’t so long. What’s a minute, after all?”

“We’ll never miss it. Our love has so many other minutes yet to come.”

3

She woke up in a different city. Not only a different city, in a different apartment, a different room. A different sun out there in the sky, fresh from the mint, that got into places it had never managed to get into before. Everything different. A different she. Different eyes, that saw all these new things; the old ones thrown away. Even a different name. Mrs. Maxwell Jones now, not Mari Ruyter any longer.

She jumped up from the bed — and even her weight was different, it was that of a handful of feathers — and rushed to the windows and threw them open. The new city, the different city, flashed out before her eyes, all magic, all azure sky and golden sunlight and sparkling like spun sugar underfoot. Even the cars and taxicabs sounded musical notes for horn-signals. Guitars and xylophones at every street crossing.

It had been called Buenos Aires the night before. She wasn’t sure what it was called today; probably Paradise. If you listened carefully, you could hear their wings softly fluttering around you in the air — along with the drone of that inbound Panagra plane from Santiago, of course.

She had once said, Always the same loneliness. Now she would have to make that. Always the same happiness.

She turned her head, and Lupita was standing there on the balcony just behind her, holding open a dressing gown for her to put on.

She smiled at her forgivingly. “You came anyway.”

“My orders were no. My heart told me yes.”

“We can’t do anything with our hearts, can we?”

“Come in, don’t catch cold.”

“Cold? What is cold? I have never heard that word before.”

“I know. You have forgotten cold. But the thing is, has cold forgotten you? Sit down, and I will do the hair for you. Do you want it the same, or some new way?”

“Not the old way, something new. Everything is new, my hair has to be new too. Can you say my new name?”

“Oh, easily. Mees-sez Mackiss-well Djones.”

She whirled around on the chair. “How did you ever—?”

“He taught me. He taught me for ten minutes, outside in the other room, before I came in to you. Oh, he is wonderful, your husband, Mees-ez Djones! Look, he gave me this, for learning it good, for getting it right.” She produced a fistful of banknotes.

“Oh, he did, did he?” She shot open a bureau drawer, brought up another fistful of her own. “Well, two can coach as well as one! Let me hear you say ‘Mister Maxwell Jones,’ and you’ve won yourself this.”

“Missata Mackiss-well Djones,” said Lupita dutifully, raising her eyes as if she were reading it off the upper wainscoting of the wall.

Her mistress crushed the lettuce-like bonus into her two hands, adding it to his, and squeezed them tight around it.

“Missata Mackiss-well Djones, Missata Mackisswell-Djones, Missatamackiswelldjones,” rattled Lupita enthusiastically, like a train clicking over a trestle.

Her mistress sandwiched her hands down near where her heart was. “That’s my music, that’s my song! That perfume standing there, that’s yours, take it. Now say, ‘Mister Maxwell Jones, husband of Mrs. Maxwell Jones.’ Oh, say it out, let me hear it!”

“Missata Mackis-well Djones, hoz-burn of Mees-ez Mackiss-well Djones,” recited the scholar.

“Careful on that second syllable,” cautioned her mistress. She clasped her hands raptly before her face. “Oh, but that rings sweet in my ears. Those little silver shoes, he ones with the halters — take them, take them, it’s a pleasure. Now try this. ‘Mister Maxwell Jones, boss of Mrs. Maxwell Jones.’”

“—bus of Mees-ez Mackiss-well Djones,” she got.

“The dress with the shiny buckles you’ve always admired — in there on the end — take it down, take it away!”

“Missata Mackiswell Djones, hos-burn of Mees-ez Djones, bus of Mees-ez Djones,” panted Lupita, and then blew out her breath vaingloriously.

“Oh, stop, stop!” her mistress pleaded. “You’ll have me down to my jewelry yet, if you keep it up.”

“I say it for free,” offered Lupita. “It makes your face so shiny.”

“And I’ll say it with you. I have to, or I’ll burst. Put three cheers on the end of it. Now. One— Two—

“Missata Mackis-well Djones, hos-burnn of Mees-ez Mackiss-well Djones, bus of Mees-ez Mackis-well Djones, they both poured out in unison.

“Three cheers for him!”

“Que viva El!”

“Come here. Bend your face down.” Her mistress planted a resounding kiss squarely on Lupita’s forehead. Then she pushed her away. “Now check out. Make yourself scarce. Crawl toward the front door on your hands and knees or something.”

“Don’t you want me to wait on the table?”

“Did you ever hear of a crowd?”

She summed herself up in the mirror, walked over to the bedroom door, stood there a moment by it, hand to knob.

“What is it, Señora? Did you forget something?”

“I just wanted to make this minute last a little longer, this wonderful minute of first opening my bedroom door in the morning. You see, on the other side of it, in the next room, I have a husband waiting for me at the breakfast table. And I never had that before. It’s Christmas morning every morning of my life from now on. She sighed, and turned the knob, and opened it. Now. Here come my presents, all rolled into one.”

His head turned, and he grinned, and all of a sudden the walls had all been done over in luminous paint.

“Good morning. Gee, it’s wonderful to have you here to say good morning to.”

“What a beautiful expression! The most beautiful expression there is! Say it again. Give it to me again.”

“Good morning. Good morning.”

“Here, sit down,” she said, when they’d been all through that a few times, “and I’ll wait on you.”

“Why not let me wait on you?” he objected.

“That’s for nightlife, outside — the man waits on his lady. This is homelife, inside — the wife waits on her man.”

She poured coffee, moved their two cups so close together that they formed a double-header; or one big cup with a figure-eight-shaped rim.

“Do you know what this is? Our first breakfast together. And we’ve been married four years.”

“We came the long way around, but we got there just the same. Oh, if you looked good at night,” he faltered, “you ought to see what you look like in the morning. Number Eight in the books—”

“‘You’re the Cream in My Coffee.’”

“Number Fourteen—”

“‘Hands Across the Table.’”

“Gee, your eyes are shining.”

“Sure. I have everything now. I finally made it. I have a breakfast table. I have a coffee pot. I have a husband. What more is there in the world to have? What more is there to try for?”

She sighed. She let her eyelids close blissfully. “Let me have it just once more. Say it in that way that means this is where you spend your nights.”

“Good morning.”

“Good morning.”

They chinked the rims of their cups together.

They came outside together under the glass door-canopy of her apartment building, into a night that was pure black velvet and gold sequins. She threw her head far back and inhaled delightedly. “Ah, champagne,” she crooned. “The poor man’s champagne — fresh air. Elixir. Can’t you smell the ghosts of springtime flowers?”

“Springtime in October,” he smiled.

“When it should be in May.”

“Isn’t that your chauffeur over there, at the curb, trying to attract your attention?”

“I know, I’m trying to pretend I don’t see him.” She made a furtive outward slice with the flat of her hand. “Go ’way, Alberto. Don’t bother me; not tonight.” She snuggled up against Jones, her two arms twined around his one. “Let’s walk to work tonight. I feel very boy-and-girlish. I feel very bride-and-groomy, newlyweddish. Let’s walk and see the town. I want to get to know this town, it’s brought me so much happiness. Like — when someone sends you a present, you want to thank them by dropping in on them for a visit.”

He looked around briefly. “You’ll have to do something about Alberto. He’s still coasting along behind you with the car.”

“I’ll put him out of his misery,” she said. She opened her handbag, took out a banknote, left Jones for a moment, and went back to the car. Then she rejoined him, her Virginia-creeper arms took up where they had left off before.

“Now I’m strictly on the hoof. But look who I’ve got with me.”

“I’d doing even better than you,” he grinned. “Ask anyone who has the best of the deal.”

“All right, I will!” she said with sudden gay insanity. Before he could stop her she’d veered aside and accosted a well-dressed matron who was going by at the moment. “Dispensa, but I’d like to ask you something. Would you rather be him, with me along, or me, with him along?”

“Mari!” he expostulated, appalled.

The matron shrugged with elaborate politeness, smiled unsurely, finally pointed off into the middle distance, about three blocks away. “Por alia, creo,” she said in flurried improvisation. Down that way, I believe.

He hastily tipped his hat and dragged the happiness-intoxicated Mari on her way. They nearly choked with laughter. “Where was she sending us?” he wondered. “And don’t answer that!”

“Let’s play a game,” she suggested. “Let’s pretend we’re — what we would have been four years ago. Very broke, married on a shoestring. We haven’t even got the price to ride to work. You’re... you’re just a drummer in the band, see?” (“Can’t you make me at least a cornetist?” he pleaded.) “And I’m just the girl singer with the same band. Oh, we’re full of ambition, but we’ve got holes in our socks and stockings.” (“You’re not kidding, even today,” he snickered. “You must have been peeking.”) “But you must buy me things along the way,” she concluded. “You would have even then.”

An old woman with a basket came up to them while they were waiting to cross at the next intersection. “Claveles? Pretty pink carnations for the lady?”

“Would he have bought ’em for her?” he said to Mari in an aside. “You bet he would!”

She put her hand on his arm restrainingly. “Nothing over a quarter.”

“How much are they?” he asked the old lady.

“Four for a half-peso, Señorita.”

“I have only twenty-five cents to spend. Give me two.” He turned to Mari with them. “Here, pin them to your coat.”

“Here,” said the old woman suddenly. “Here’s a third. You’re so much in love. It’s for you that such flowers are grown.”

“Let me give her something,” he urged in an undertone.

She shook her head firmly. “Don’t spoil it. Don’t you see, that’s the beauty of the gesture; it’s her gift to us. You’re just a poor drummer in the band, I’m just a singer.” (“Cornetist,” he corrected.) “That’s all we have, that quarter. But we’re so wealthy. Everyone in the world loves us tonight, and we love everyone.”

They crossed the street together almost at a run, laughing. And nearly got run down.

“He didn’t love us, just then, that taxi-driver,” he commented.

“What do they mean when they say cabron?”

He quickly put his hand over her mouth.

“Look, a five-and-ten!” she squealed. “That’s the place for him and her! Take me in and buy me something there!”

“What do you need?”

“No,” she grimaced. “A present. Even in a five-and-ten he’d throw his money away on something she didn’t need.”

“Foolish boy,” he murmured disapprovingly. “How about this?” he said presently. He scanned the label on a little flask, about the size of a pinkey, filled with something grass-green. “Fiores de mi Alma.” He uncapped it, took a whiff, jerked his nose aside. “Whew! No! Benzine and overripe melons. Whoever’s soul that was kept it too long, without ice.”

They passed on to another counter. “Here’s something, now!” he brayed. “Now we’re getting somewhere! Garnet rings. Or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof. Priced at only a peso twenty-five.”

“You’re making fun of our game,” she cautioned him gently. “He wouldn’t do it that way.”

“Then cue me,” he said penitently.

“All right.” She hastily stripped a solitaire worth about eighteen thousand from her finger, dropped it into her handbag. “Max,” she said wistfully, “I’ve never had a ring from you. Even when we were married, I had to borrow Bee’s, remember? I know you can’t afford it right now, but until the real thing comes along—” She eyed the tray longingly. “It’d be something from you, to me. That’d make the brass gold. That’d make the glass ruby. Times when you’re not with me, I’d have it to put to my cheek and whisper to.”

He selected one and slipped it on her finger. A darkeyed, sleek-bobbed little salesgirl drew near, stood watching them.

They raised the newly-ringed finger between them, and, surreptitiously, first he touched his lips to it, then she.

“Like in that alto sax passage,” he murmured. “‘Diamond bracelets Woolworth doesn’t sell, baby.’”

She kissed him. “Thank you for my present, darling.”

“It’s funny what a hand’ll do. You make it look like the real thing, just because it’s on your hand. When it’s off your hand, it’s junk. When it’s on, it’s a million dollars.”

They lingered on there hogging the counter. The salesgirl stood by, smiling benevolently, understandingly.

Mari turned to her suddenly. “D’you like him? What do you think of him? But you can’t have him. I got him first.”

“I have one myself,” the pert little salesgirl answered. “And you can’t have him.”

“That leaves everybody even. And everybody happy.”

They went running out of the store again, giving the glass swing-doors such a fling that they all but knocked a package out of the arms of the next customer behind them.

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you? Maybe I am — crazy with happiness.”

“And now to work.” They broke into a quickstep together, to make up for lost time.

“Oh, this beautiful town,” she exulted, trotting along beside him. “Max, let’s settle down here. I know we’d be happy here. When our engagement’s over, let’s stay on here for good, never go back. We found our happiness in this place, let’s not leave it again.”

“Is this us, now, or them? I’m just a little mixed-up.”

“Us. Us. The four of us that we’ve become. The two of us, that are still them. The two of them that have become us.”

“Yeah,” he said thoughtfully. “Why not? Why shouldn’t we? No more trains, no more hotels. Let’s become just Mr. and Mrs. We’ll buy a home of our own. I can have the bank account transferred, there’s a branch of the National City here. We’ll throw away our suitcases, and we’ll let our waistlines fill out a little—”

“Mine will have a good reason to,” she slipped in, in a hasty undertone.

“We’ll live like all the others do, and get something for our lives. Why didn’t we figure it out sooner? Five hundred million people can’t be wrong!”

“And we’ll never think of that again; you know, that other thing. We’ll put that behind us forever. That was just a publicity pipe-dream, anyway. We got so, we believed it ourselves.”

He started to whistle.

“Know that? What does it mean to you?”

“Give me another chorus. It’s bringing something back.”

“Made for each other, your heart and mine, Fashioned together, from one design—”

“Are your feet getting tired? You have to dance yet tonight, you know.”

“What do you suppose I’m doing now? Walking? Oh, use your heart.”

They turned a corner, on wings.

“Here’s the job.”

“It’s not a job tonight. It’s — we’re together, aren’t we? Oh, I’m going to knock them—” She stopped suddenly, looked at him.

“Don’t say that,” he cautioned her gently.

Then they both laughed. And knew, by that, they had it licked at last. When you can laugh about a thing, you’ve got it licked.

“Let’s go in the side way like the hired hands do,” she suggested. “The heck with their lobbies and plush carpets and all the bows you always get. And above all, those pictures of mine, with sinister shadows all over them. I don’t want to pass them tonight.”

“They are sort of grim,” he agreed. “Well, it’s just a selling angle.”

When they got in, still arm in arm, he walked right on past the door of his dressing room with her, and on to hers.

“Mind?”

“Who ever heard of a married pair with more than one dressing room between them?”

“What’ll your maid say?”

She closed the door after the two of them. That door that he’d never yet got past until now. He turned and gave the inside of it a quizzical look, as much as to say “Now what’ve you got to say?”

The maid, who’d been pottering around over in a corner, advanced toward her holding out a dressing gown.

Mari turned her head toward her from the make-up table. “You can’t stay in here tonight. I’m a married woman now.”

“But... but who’ll help you dress, Señorita?”

“My husband, who else? You can come back afterwards and put the things away, tidy up.” She waved her on her way.

Presently she had to say to him, “I’m getting nowhere fast. Every time I get a little pancake on, you kiss it off again. You’re going to have a very bad case of makeup poisoning before the night is out.”

“I’ll behave,” he said. “I’ll try to keep away from you.”

“She has my dress back there on a hanger. No, in back — you can’t miss it.”

Somebody knocked on the door.

“Come,” she said.

Robles, the club manager, stuck his head in the door. “Señorita Ruyter, the band is ready and waiting, and there is no sign of Señor Jones anywhere. He is not in his dressing room. I have been calling his hotel and no one has seen him there since late yesterday aft—”

“Who d’you suppose this is, Xavier Cugat?” Jones answered, stepping out from behind a costume-laden screen where he had gone for a moment.

Robles pointed perpendicularly to the floor, extremely disconcerted, almost scandalized. “You are in here?”

“Old-fashioned sort of guy, isn’t he?” Jones murmured to her in English. “Señor, your jaw needs rewiring; push it up a little. We have started going with each other, the senorita and I. Tell the boys Number Seven in the book; I’ll be right behind you.”

The manager backed out, appalled. “Pew que locura,” they heard him mumble to himself.

“Some husband,” Jones said. “I’m afraid I’m tarnishing your reputation all over the place.”

“Oh, blacken it like shoe polish,” she begged. “Don’t leave a bright spot on it any place.”

He pressed his cheek against the top of her head. “I hate to leave you. Even just for three fast choruses. Come soon, darling. See you on cue.”

“Don’t forget. For real — for true—”

He kissed her again. “For ever.”

Her maid crept timorously back in, in his wake. “Leave the door open. I want to hear him playing.”

She held her finger up at attention, waiting.

“There! There it is! Hear it? That’s for me.”

“No, not yet, Señorita. I know your music by heart mys—”

“You don’t understand. Not my professional music. He’s talking to me, from out front there. That’s for me. He’s sending me a message back. He knows I’m listening to it.”

She opened her arms wide toward the doorway, held them in preferred embrace. “Made for each other, your heart and mine—”

The maid began to hum along with her, in the Spanish version of it. “Di que me quieres, asi asi—”

“The senorita is going out tonight? What dress...?”

“The senorita is going home tonight. Home, with her husband. Just the plain dress of a wife.”

“I can’t find that kind here on the rack. What does one of those look like?”

She wasn’t there any more to hear her. She went down the backstage alley until she could see his face, out there before her. He turned her way, looking for her, and she caught his eye. She blew him a kiss.

He couldn’t do it as openly, because he was out front, but he secretly sent her one in return, raising his hand to touch his mouth, then indicating her direction with it.

She pressed it to her heart, as though she had caught it there. She had.

Her cue.

She could have done this with her eyes closed. She kept them on his face, let her muscles carry her forward by memory. Once in awhile she had to turn, or she had to face front, and that broke the look between them. But never for long.

She was dancing in a void, dancing in a vacuum. There wasn’t anyone else there but him.

The snake wasn’t very vicious tonight. The victim wasn’t very frightened. It was a lazy snake, it was a dreamy victim.

A house somewhere in the suburbs. A kid. Maybe even a pair of them, a little girl, then a little boy. Why not? Other women had them. He could go on playing if he wanted to. But just close by in the city, no more tours. And she’d never set foot in another night club again; even if she came to pick him up in the car, she’d wait outside until he was through.

No more of this. No more tinsel, no more sequins, no more colored gelatin-slides.

A minute ago, she said to herself. A minute from now, she promised herself. A dream only lasts a minute. But when you wake up, you’re awake all day. I’m waking up now. The day is beginning for me. The long, long day—

She flung herself downward. The murderer-snake flickered about her head, finally lay still athwart her.

Somebody screamed, far off in the distance. In another world.

A house in the suburbs. A little breakfast-room, all in—

There was a lot of noise, like there always was at the conclusion of one of her performances.

It wasn’t quite as even, tonight, the noise. Something about it.

Someone kept calling “Put on the lights! Put on the lights!” over and over again.

That scream came again, closer at hand. It was the scream of a man’s voice. It was usually the scream of a woman’s, but this time it was the scream of a man’s voice. A heartrending scream of protest, of denial. “No-o-o-o!” prolonged almost beyond endurance.

And then again, that other voice, not the same one, two or three other voices now, for more had joined the first one: “Put on the lights! For God’s sake, somebody put on those lights! Can’t you see something’s happened here?”

Suddenly they were on in burning brightness all around her; they crept under her eyelids, which she kept closed.

That wasn’t on cue; they weren’t supposed to come on until after Max had picked her up and gone out with her.

There was a trampling sound, of people fighting, or struggling in some way.

A glass suddenly crashed to the floor, close by her prone head, and shattered. One of the little pieces nicked her forehead, she could feel the sting.

The screaming voice had come again. “My wife is dead! She killed her! There she is, there! See her? Murderess! Assassin! Let go of me! Stop holding me back! I’ll kill her! I’ll beat her to death with my bare hands!”

Max’s face was suddenly down close beside hers on the floor. “Hurry up, get up! Never mind the finale routine. They’ve turned hysterical and ugly. I’ve got to get you out of this place fast!”

She scrambled to her feet, his arms giving her a quick lift. He began to pull her toward the wings.

“Do something!” she heard him say to one of his musicians. “Hold them back until I can get her out of the building. Those waiters aren’t enough.”

Over her shoulder, in quick horror, as he whisked her with him, she received the impression of a massed crowd at bay, forming a living wall, so to speak, all along one side of the dance floor. Waiters, desperately forming a chain of outstretched arms, were trying to hold them back.

It was the voice of a mob, now, a lynch-mob.

“Kill her! She caused the death of this woman here! She’s a witch, a devil! Kill her before the police can get here! Kill them both!”

Two or three broke through, and there were isolated flurries of fisticuffs as the musicians loyally tried to head them off.

And in the background, more ominous even than the cries for her death, a sudden shout raised by someone: “Head them off outside, around the back way! He’s trying to get her out that way! We can get them around at the back!”

“We’ll never get out of this building alive—” she panted.

The manager suddenly blocked their way, in the back-stage alley, as they came running down it, she cowering close to Jones.

Jones backed a fist toward him. “Get out of the way or I’ll—!”

The manager was pale to the point of leukemia. “No — I’m trying to help you! It’s already too late, that way. They’re already out there. We just locked the door. Here, through here, into my office, is the only way left!”

Jones suddenly balked at the threshhold. “What are you trying, to trick us? What other way out is there from there?”

“The window. You can drop down from it. Is a little alley between the two buildings. You know, garbage-alley? Very dark and narrow. Leads up to street. You can wait in there, watch your chance, slip out quick when their backs are turned.”

He went in with them, threw back a drape to reveal it. It was very small, only half the size of an ordinary window-square. It jammed when he tried to force it open. “Valgame Dios!” he sobbed, terrified.

“Here, let me do it,” said Jones. “Give me that onyx ashtray from the desk.” He smashed the glass out from the frame, then pecked at it around on all sides to get the clinging glass fragments out of it.

“Lock the door, lock the door!” the manager said to someone over his shoulder. He picked up the phone. “Give me the police!” he said agitatedly. “Quickly, Señorita, quickly! I have a riot here at the Ta-Ba-Ris, tell them to send some people around right away!”

They were already beginning to pound on the door from the outside.

“Hurry, hurry!” the manager heaved. “You don’t know them down here when they get started. They’ll not only tear you both to pieces, they’ll tear my beautiful office to pieces!”

“And that’s what really counts,” said Jones coldly. “Don’t nudge, I want to see what I’m getting into out here.” He let himself out backward, clung, and then slowly let his body straighten out under him, groping with his feet. It wasn’t prohibitively high, just a full arm’s reach overhead from the ground.

“Come on,” he said to her, “I’m here to hold you.”

They were taking a fire axe to the other side of the door now. Sudden white streaks showed up on the inside, with a blade in them each time.

He held her in his arms and eased her drop down to the ground.

“No show tomorrow night!” the manager hissed down out of the window at them, forbiddingly.

“No, no show tomorrow night, you bet!” Jones agreed grimly.

The manager popped his head back in, blotted out the lighted window-square by jerking the drape across it once more.

In the dark, there was a crunching and fluted sound as her feet found the ground directly in front of him, lowered by his embrace.

“What was that?” he said. “Look out for all the broken glass and bottles lying around back here!”

“Not glass, Max,” she murmured. “These are my dreams that are scattered around here, all smashed up into little pieces, thrown away and waiting for the garbage-man.”

4

They were back in New York. Just back. In a perpendicular hotelshaft that shrank Central Park to the size of a green bath-mat spread out flat way down below their windows. They were unpacking — or rather she was doing the unpacking, he was fooling around on the phone.

“I can’t get him,” he said, and hung up.

“Why don’t you try him at his home?” she said. “He must have left the office by this time. It’s after six already.”

“I can try again later. Let’s go downstairs and eat awhile. I’m starved.”

On their way along the corridor he switched aside to one of the other doors, knocked. “I want to let the fellows know about rehearsal, in case I don’t see them later.”

They were all in there. Strangely quiescent, for some reason. Just sitting around. Muted.

“Ryan Hall, Friday afternoon, huh?” he announced. “I hired the same studio we used to use.”

Everyone was very quiet.

She came up, stood right beside him, as if sensing something.

“Max,” Dixon said abruptly, and then stopped.

“Hm?”

“I won’t be there. I’m getting out.”

Jones came the rest of the way into the room, she with him, closed the door after him. His face had got a little whiter, she couldn’t help noticing. But he was very steady, quiet, casual. “Getting out of the band?”

Dixon was forthright about it, anyhow. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah,” looking Jones straight in the eye.

“Any... particular reason?”

“Yeah. I’m getting married. You met Helen.”

“Well — I’m married. Brad and Bee were married when they first came to me.”

Dixon wouldn’t look anywhere but at him, wouldn’t even blink. But he hated it, you could see. She could see.

“She asked me to,” he said.

Jones didn’t answer.

“I had her on the phone just now.”

Jones didn’t answer.

“She said she wouldn’t marry me if I stayed with the band.” Then he added, “This band.”

Jones didn’t answer.

Dixon finished it down to the last bitter phrase. Like medicine. “She said she doesn’t want us to have bad luck. It was either her or the band.” He looked down for the first time, then up again. “I made it her.”

Jones answered at last. “Congratulations,” he said, and went toward him holding out his hand.

Dixon got up and they shook. Hard.

They didn’t say anything more, either one of them. What more was there? Dixon went over to the window and looked the other way.

Jones turned to go, with her. “Well, I’ll see you other guys, then—”

Fingers took a telegram out of his pocket, in such a way that it arrested his attention. “I can’t quit you right when Dix does,” he said, when he had it.

“Sure you can, why not? What’s that you’ve got there?”

“It’s an offer from Tommy Everback. Russ got one too.”

For the first time Jones showed a little emotion. His face flushed up a bit. “What’s he trying to do, hijack—” He stopped that. “What do you want to do about it?”

“Accept,” Fingers said sturdily. “I like you too much not to give it to you straight. That’s all you can do for a guy when you like him, give it to him straight. I don’t want to stay on.”

And Russell, drums and percussion, didn’t answer, so that was his answer.

She spoke for the first time, forlornly. “It’s on account of me, Max.”

“I know.”

“It’s nobody’s fault,” Dixon said. “It’s too scary. I don’t want to fool around with it any more. I don’t want to be near it. I don’t want to live with it. Bee and Brad got out long ago, and they were right.”

“We love her too,” Fingers said. “Just as much as you. Don’t think we don’t.”

“That leaves you, Parr,” Jones said. He read his face. “Oh, you too.”

“I’m quitting the business altogether, Max,” Parr said gently. “Buying into a partnership in a sporting-goods store.” He was Bradley’s successor on tenor sax.

Jones had forgotten to move. He just stood there looking brave, and hurting all over.

They were hurting just as much. No one seemed to know how to end it. Women would have, but they were men.

Dixon didn’t want to keep staring the other way, down at Central Park.

Russell didn’t want to keep looking down at the cigar he wasn’t smoking any more but was still holding between his fingers.

Fingers didn’t want to keep looking down at a glass that someone had taken a short drink from awhile back.

Any more than Jones wanted to keep standing there in the middle of the room like a schoolteacher overawing a bunch of truants.

She knew that about each one of them.

They didn’t know how to end it, that was all.

Finally she took him, unnoticeably of course, and led him out of the room with her. And she was the one made their adieux for him, as she did. Lightly, so as not to hurt. “Well, we’re going down to eat. See you after supper, boys.”

Outside the door he looked at her and he smiled.

“It looks like I haven’t got a band any more.”

She couldn’t console him; she didn’t try.

“Which way are we going? Down anyway, or back to our own rooms?”

“I guess I’m not hungry any more, either,” he admitted, turning the way she had.

It was one of those plushy apartment houses along Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn’s Fifth Avenue. Ten to fifteen thousand a year income bracket. Jones wouldn’t let the hallman announce them. They went right to the upstairs door.

She had misgivings. “He may not be home, Max. We should have phoned.”

“Then we’ll wait. He’d be glad to see us at any hour of the night or day. This is Morty, honey. Are you forgetting?”

“Well I can’t understand—”

“I think he was out of town, don’t you?” he passed it off cheerfully. “Maybe one of those office mix-ups.”

The door opened. Opened wide, full-span; not cagily. It was one of those homes where the door always opened wide at a summons, you could tell that, not suspiciously narrow. Rubin was standing there, tie at décolleté, reading-glasses in hand.

Behind him there was a vista of homey reading-lamplight in several epicentric interlocking circles on the floor, a little girl with glossy black Japanese-doll bangs stretched out on her stomach in one of them, legs swinging backward in air, reading a comic sheet; sage-green carpeting; a TV percolating: “And now, for three thousand...” a black bull-terrier with a white spot in the middle of his forehead monopolizing the seat of an easy-chair, but with a guilty look in its soulful eyes.

“Well!” Jones exploded in his face, enthusiastically.

“Hello, Mort,” she said in a quieter key.

“Mari and Max,” was all he said. There was something strained about him.

“Say, what’s going on down at your office? The livelong week I’ve been trying—”

“I’ve got a new girl,” Rubin said lamely. “Goldie left me, you know. She finally got married.”

“She got my name plain enough. I made her repeat it after me each time.”

“I think Morty was out of town,” she suggested tactfully.

He just looked at her; didn’t say whether he had been or not.

“Look, I’ve been trying all week to get you. The band blew up in my face.”

Rubin acted as though he’d already heard that by indirection; nothing happened to his eyes. “I’ve been thinking of giving up the business,” he said reticently.

Meanwhile, they hadn’t seemed to progress beyond the door. Rubin appeared to notice this himself, at about the same time Jones did; she already had, some little time before.

“Come in,” he said somewhat belatedly. He gave a look over his shoulder first. A dubious look, a look of uncertainty. Or almost a furtive look, the kind that you give when you look to see if the coast is clear.

He closed the door. “You never met my little girl Shirley. Get up, dolling; that’s not nice you should say hello to people with your tummy on the floor.”

“I was going to get up,” the child protested earnestly. “But I can’t get up all at one time, I have to get up one end first and then the other. I was already moving one end, but the other end hadn’t started yet, that’s all.”

“Oh, I see, dolling,” he said with tender gravity. “Say hello to Papa’s friends.”

She shook Mari’s hand. “Isn’t she pretty!” she marvelled to her father.

“You’re pretty, too,” Mari said.

“I know,” the child acquiesced. “But I’m not supposed to know that ’til I’m older, ’cause it’ll make me stuck-up.”

And “You,” Rubin said severely, addressing the terrier, “get down. I can’t even go to the door? The minute my back is turned.” The chair was already vacant at the second word, with a vaulting leap.

“Shall I tell Mamma to come in?” the little girl asked.

“Not just yet, a little later maybe,” he said evasively.

The child suddenly seemed to have made an esoteric discovery of stupefying consequence. Her eyes opened wide, and her mouth too. “Is that the lady that dances, Papa?” she gasped breathlessly. She took a step backward and sidled around to the sheltered side of him, clinging.

“Sh, sh, sh,” he cautioned her, staccato. He guided her ahead of him gently, by the shoulders, toward a door, eased her through. “Go inside now, the kitchen. Help Mamma dry.” She went with her little body turned one way, her face steadily the other.

“Cigarette, Mari?” he offered when he’d come back, as if to make amends.

“No, thanks,” Mari said despondently, lowering her head.

“Don’t say anything—”

He never had a chance to finish telling them what not to say. A pleasant-looking middle-aged woman came in. “Friends, Mort?” she said cordially. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“This is my wife Rachel, better known as Ray,” he said fondly, slipping an arm about her waist. He noticeably didn’t give their names. There was something a little taut, brittle about him.

“Why don’t you make the folks some coffee, Ray?” he suggested.

“A pleasure,” she acceded. “And I think we can do a little better than just coffee around here, don’t you?” she said with a friendly wink at all three.

“Oh, don’t trouble. Please,” Mari besought, almost with a woebegone look.

“Mort’s friends shouldn’t have a cup of coffee in his house?” she insisted warmly. “It’s a privilege to make it.”

She went out again.

“Excuse me a minute,” Rubin said unhappily, after a moment’s lapse, and went after her.

“Something seems to be on Mort’s mind,” Jones remarked presently, to break the silence. “Notice it?”

A china cup suddenly shattered, somewhere nearby.

“Somebody dropped something,” he smiled obtusely.

There was no answering smile in her eyes. “She just found out who we were. Who I am.”

“I don’t get you,” he said blankly. “What are you talking ab—”

“Max, let’s get out of here. For my own sake, as well as theirs. Don’t prolong this. It’s cruel.”

“What’s come over you? We can’t just get up and stalk out without a word, now that we’re here.”

She shaded her eyes with her hand. “Oh, this is an awful situation. I knew we shouldn’t have come. I knew, I knew, ahead of time. All that trouble you’ve been having getting him down at his office. I knew what it meant. I didn’t want to tell you, but I knew.”

“You’re talking riddles,” he said. “You’re talking through your hat.”

“Then listen. Just listen a minute.”

Two voices could be heard, somewhere beyond the door, mingled in guarded but heated contention; one protesting, one attempting to reassure. Wordlessly blurred for the most part, an occasional phrase piercing through to merciless clarity.

“It’s the child I’m thinking of! I don’t want anything like that in the same house with her. Who knows what it is?”

“Did I know they were coming here?”

“Make them go, make them go. I couldn’t come out there again, I’m too nervous. Look, I’m shaking like a leaf.”

And then, rising in sudden, almost terrified, command: “Shirley, come back here! Come away from that door!”

“She was peeking out at us through the crack,” she said to Jones poignantly. “Like kids do, when you’ve become a freak.”

Rubin re-entered suddenly. He was holding his hat in his hand.

“Look, I’m going to ask you to let me take you down and buy you coffee in the restaurant, around the corner,” he said diffidently. “We just found out, not a grain of coffee in the house.” He swallowed. “Ray’s too ashamed to show her face again. We come back in a few minutes and finish our talk here—”

“You did that very well, Morty,” Mari murmured forgivingly, getting up and preceding him to the door. “We didn’t want any coffee. We just want to go, ourselves.”

Jones couldn’t talk at all. His face was very white. Like when you’ve been kicked in the stomach, and all the wind’s been driven out of you.

“You don’t have to come down with us,” she said at the elevator, trying to spare him. “We can find our way.”

“I want to; I got to,” Rubin said almost fiercely. “I can’t let you go like this.”

They rode down together. He walked with them outside the building. He walked with them to the corner. An arc-light made it pale there. The subway-chute was right across the street. They were taking the subway these days.

Jones spoke for the first time. “We know,” he said disheartenedly.

“Sure you know,” Rubin agreed. “It’s better you do. Who wants to lie to you?”

“Are we through?” Jones asked bluntly. “You and us, I mean.”

Rubin, always so voluble, seemed to have trouble getting together enough words to make an answer out of. “I’m... cutting down my list these days. The five Di Martino sisters, Hal Weston’s band — nobody else much. With the Di Martinos is a personal hobligation — their father and I—

“New clients I’m not taking on... In fact I’m thinking ser’usly getting out the business altogether. Let the younger fellows worry themselves bald in the head.”

“We are through,” Jones deciphered. “You just told us so.”

“There isn’t anything I could do for you, even if I wanted to. You’re up against a stone wall. It happened once too often, maybe. It should have stopped while it, while you was still ahead. What it is, I couldn’t say. Before they all wanted you. Now they’re all afraid you should come near them. You got like a jinx, a huddu, on you. You don’t think I tried, I been working? Even before you came back. Was in all the papers, you know, that lest time. Another thing that’s funny. When it happened close by, would nobody believe it, they think it’s still some kind of a trick, a fake. A horrengement even with the police yet, the medical exemener. It heppens far away, in Italy, in South America yet, they read it in the newspapers, and soddenly because it heppens far away, that seems to make it true. Why this is, don’t ask me. Was even an editorial in the Times about it, I saw it myself, and than that is nothing more ser’us. Only the other day Willy Robbins, you know, the Lucky Horseshoe, before I could even open my mouth on the phone, he stops me. ‘Mort, if you culled to talk about anybody else, I’ll listen. If you culled to talk about those two people, I’ll heng up. It makes me nervous even on the telephone. I’m operating a cabaret-restaurant, not a morgue.’”

“That’s giving it to us,” Jones agreed dismally.

“You want to try M.C.A. William Morris, one of the others, maybe they can do more for you than I can.”

“You or nobody,” Jones let him know dispiritedly. “I’m afraid you got to count me out. Is not only from a business angle, is also my own personal feelings I would rather not kip up the association.”

“Mort means he’s promised his wife to get rid of us,” she translated clairvoyantly.

He didn’t contradict her. “She’s a mother... You know how mothers are, she’s thinking of the child...”

“She should come first with you,” she approved.

“She does,” he said heavily. “Look, I—” He started having trouble with his pockets, going in this one, coming out of that one, both hands at once, all over himself. Like when your hands are embarrassed over what they’re going to do. “Is some money coming to you, I think — I’m not sure how much, or what from; I haven’t time right now to go into it—”

Jones put his floundering hands at rest, with one of his own. Kindly but firm. “No, there isn’t. There are no royalties in our line. We weren’t able to finish out the South American date, so we forfeited the balance of what was due us on that. I already straightened all that out with you at the office; we went over the accounts. No loans. No gifts. We just want to work for our money.”

“You make me feel perfect,” Rubin murmured bitterly.

“We feel good too,” Jones said. “Awful good. Let’s get away from here,” he said to her. “It’s like there was someone dead around here.”

“Old times,” Rubin said thoughtfully. “Old times is what is dead around here, must be.”

He tapped his pocket some more. Absently, this time, as though he had a pain in there. “There’s on my desk a letter. Came in the other day. It must be still there. I didn’t pay much attention to it. From a man in Panama, has some hole-in-the-wall café down there. He’s asking do I know of anyone... To you I wouldn’t want to suggest it—”

“Then we will!” snapped Jones decisively. “We’ll take anything. Without asking.”

“I’ll... I’ll write him.” He seemed to have trouble speaking. “I’ll look into it for you. This is just as a friend, I’m not accepting commission. In case it’s — it’s bona fide, I’ll have the two tickets waiting for you at the office. Drop in a week or ten days—”

“No,” said Jones firmly. “Mail them to us at the hotel, whenever you’re ready with them. No more of these goodbyes. It takes your appendix out. Just look at your face.”

“Such a windy corner,” protested Rubin virtuously. “I hate this corner. Every time I come down here, it makes my eyes smot. You wouldn’t believe it. In ull Brooklyn you couldn’t find such a windy corner like this one; Eastern Pokkway and—”

“So long,” said Jones brusquely, and started away on his own.

He was still ranting about the windy corner, and blinking with wet disapproval. “I couldn’t figure out where it comes from, could you?”

“From the heart,” she said quietly. She put her face over toward him. “Kiss me goodbye, on the cheek. And feel a little sorry for me.”

Then she turned and ran for her life, to overtake her fast-striding husband, without looking back.

Five

Panama: La Perla Cafe

1

When she woke up, he was standing there at the porthole, with his back to her, looking out. There was an outside glare outlined against his head and shoulders, as though somebody had sprinkled baking soda over him, but he made the cabin dim just by standing there like that and blocking the porthole.

It was like waking up in a Turkish bath. They seemed to have left the last breeze back outside the Atlantic end of the Canal, when they started through the night before. “What’d they cut it through?” she’d asked him one time during the night, “The hot ashes in somebody’s coal furnace?”

“Are we in?” she murmured.

“Been in for half an hour.”

“What does it look like?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then what are you looking at through there?”

“What I’m looking at isn’t out there,” he answered. He turned his shoulder away, and let part of the glare in. Then he moved away entirely, and let all the rest of it in. It came in almost fizzing, like seydlitz powder, it was so strong.

“Stay there,” she pleaded. “At least you kept it shady.” She pulled a stocking up over her leg. “Oh, God. Even nylon scorches you.”

He’d started putting on a necktie. Then he changed his mind, took it off, crammed it in his pocket. “Weighs a ton.” He tipped a pitcher. “Have some water.”

“No, I remember what it tastes like from the last time.

They dunked part of the machinery in it, to soak off the rust.” She wiped her dry lips in recollection.

He watched a ripple of white descend over her, straighten into a spotless little sport-dress. “A woman always looks cool, even in this kind of heat. She’s about the only thing you can stand looking at.”

“Take the word of one,” she said tersely. “She may look it, but she doesn’t feel it. She’s you all over, inside, brother.”

“Am I as pretty as that inside?” he asked.

They both laughed.

An hour later, each with a bag weighing down each arm, they stepped out of the shade of the iron-roofed, cement-floored customs shed into the acetylene-blaze of Panama City. Tall feather-duster palms were vaguely somewhere in the background, bordering a plaza or lining some avenue, but even they looked wilted and tinder-dry.

“For God’s sake, let’s get something over our heads,” she gasped.

A taxi sliced in ahead of another one that had started for them. The leather of the seat burned their skins at first touch; they both hitched away from it for a moment, then eased back gradually.

“Do you know where the La Perla Café is?”

“Yes sorr; I teck you,” the driver promised in basic English.

It was out from the center of town. The taxi swerved off the highway suddenly and stopped.

“Why, it’s a... a soldiers’ and sailors’ dive. I bet they’ve got rooms upstairs for—”

She looked at him and he looked at her. Then he looked down at the ground. He smiled as he did so, but it was a pretty washed-out smile.

“How low can you get?” he murmured half-audibly.

She braced herself, pitched her head defiantly. “All right,” she said, “so I won’t go upstairs. And you better not let me catch you trying to sneak up behind my back. Let’s go in. The longer we stand looking at it from out here, the worse it looks.”

They went in, with a pretension of jauntiness that didn’t fool each other.

Inside, there was that forlorn look a night-time place has in the morning. Rows and rows of little round white-topped tables and the chairs that went with them, the latter all slanted over the tables so that their tops met above them. And mirrors galore, with nothing to reflect yet except the other mirrors across the way. The fans, somehow, had a denuded skeletal look, the way their motionless cross-arms stood starkly out. Dank paper streamers hung from the middle of each one. A sign over the bar said “Cinzano Vermouth.” It was plugged in to light up after dark. A comatose woman sat at the far end of the bar with her head lying upon it. A basket containing a residue of wilted gardenias rapidly turning rusty in color was on the floor next to her. A cat, lazily licking its forepaw and then massaging its head with it, was curled up further along at the foot of the bar.

A fat, greasy-looking man was sitting drinking a cup of coffee, far back at one of the little tables. He got up and came toward them, as the dimness came down like a knife and scraped the outside glare off their backs.

“Where’s the manager?” Jones said. “We’re the talent.”

He didn’t get it.

“We’re supposed to see somebody named Almagorda. Is there a man named Almagorda here?”

“Piso arriba.” He turned and indicated the stairs at the back.

Jones righted one of the chairs for Mari, motioned her into it. He righted a second one for himself and joined her. “No, not in this heat,” he muttered. “We’ll stay down at street-level.”

The man went over to the stairs, jabbered up them in Spanish. Somebody else jabbered down, in answer. Then he jabbered up some more, in answer to the answer.

Then he went back to his coffee.

There was a considerable stage wait. Finally a heavy, yet indolent, tread started coming down. They both turned that way. The man on the stairs had on a pongee suit, a shirt of a virulent apricot silk, a large diamond on his finger, another one in his necktie. There were introductions. He smiled a lot, and scraped. The diamonds winked all over the place, got in their heat-seared eyes. Finally he sat down with them. His hair smelled of perfumed brillantine, but with just a touch of rancid base underlying it.

He lit a cigar. That as least took some of the curse off it.

“How you like my place? You disappointed?” A blind man could have read their faces.

“No,” Jones said stoically. “We expected—”

“We’re not disappointed,” Mari quickly put in. Which was the same thought, but phrased more tactfully.

“It’s a good place, it meek good money,” he said, looking around him caressingly. “You get used to it,” he promised.

“Orrai, you want to show me maybe, long as nobody in here?”

Jones quickly shook his head. “We’re not auditioning, that’s not the idea. You’ve already signed us, remember. We were signed on up there. Six weeks and an option to renew.”

Almagorda shrugged philosophically. “I have already pay your boat fare for to com’ here, is true.”

“Which you get back out of our first three weeks pay-checks,” Jones reminded him.

“And if I do not put you on now, I do not collec’.” He shrugged again, much as to say: Bad or good, I’m stuck with you until I can get my investment back.

“Don’t let it fret you,” said Jones severely. “You don’t have to worry. We were good enough for Les Ambassadeurs, in Paris—”

“I know,” said Almagorda drily, “that’s why you’re here.”

She saw Jones swallow a lump in his throat, at the thrust. She quickly put her hand out and placed it atop his, in consolatory restraint. She half rose. “Let’s show the senor a bar or two, if he wants to see that badly.”

Jones stubbornly refused to move. “No, it’s become a point of honor now. If he thinks he’s being shortchanged—”

Almagorda wheeled both palms in front of his face. “No, no, no! Is orrai. We forget it. You go on, how you say, cold, if you want to. Anyway, the little lady she is ver’ pretty—”

“And talented,” insisted Jones tenaciously. Again her hand sought his soothingly, under the table. “When do we begin?”

“Tonight. Otherwise I have empty floor to show. I pay my others off las’ night already.” He relit his cigar. “You know how it work’, don’t you?”

“What do you mean, how it works?”

“They throw money. I think I better tell you before it hoppen. You not suppose’ to get insulted, eh? You got to pick it up. If you no pick it up, they no like that.” Jones swallowed again, this time harder than before. “We won’t get insulted.” He smiled mordantly. “We haven’t — been insulted about that in some time now.”

“Bueno! Entendido, then.” Almagorda prepared to rise. “You have foun’ some place to stay yet?”

“We just got off the boat.”

“Maybe I can help you out. I send you around to a friend of mine. A woman I know. She runs a good house. You tell her you work for Almagorda, she give you a professional rate.” He jotted an address on a card, handed it to Jones.

“You’re very good to us,” said Jones drily. “When do we go on?”

“I think you better go on early. Later they get too noisy, they doan pay attention so good.”

“I get what you mean,” said Jones. “We have to hit them while they’re still sober. Oh, brother,” he commented in an undertone for her benefit.

“About ten, fen-thirty,” opined Almagorda. “It doan have to be exact, on the minute, eh? Is no timetable here.”

“Just while they can still see straight,” concurred Jones. “Now, you got some place for us to dress?”

“Oh shue. Upstair, on secon’ floor. Is got no window, but I put in a little fan for you. You want to look at it?”

Mari quickly forestalled Jones. “Maybe we better not right now. The light might still be too good.”

They got up to go.

“Tonight, then.” Almagorda held out his hand.

Jones took it manfully. “Tonight, then. Our sentence begins.”

“What is mean sentence?” asked Almagorda, puzzled.

“Engagement,” she supplied tactfully. “It’s just another word for it.”

“Orrai, then,” Almagorda said naively. “I wish you lots of lock. I hope you have good, long sentence here.”

They went out of the place together. But they weren’t laughing.

The boarding house Almagorda had recommended them to wasn’t as bad as they had expected. Well, maybe nothing could have been. It was at least a little cleaner than La Perla. Well, again, maybe any place would have been. And the landlady tried to be friendly. She had a scraping of the bent English that thirty years of big-ditch digging had dumped all over the country like a busted keg of rusty nails and bolts. She scanned the card he had sent over.

“For him, I give you good room. He all-time friend my huss-baan. They how you say, two make one, in business.”

“Partners,” supplied Jones.

“Then my huss-baan get yellow fever. Is bite him little mosquito.” She swatted at it as though she could still see it. “Finish.”

She took them up and showed it to them. Well, it was a room. That was all you could say. It was a room.

“No open,” she warned them. “Make hot.”

“Then what was it before now?” Jones wondered, but he didn’t press the point. The climate wasn’t her fault, after all, it was Nature’s.

“At night, tin roof cool off,” she promised. “Mas fresco.”

She looked them both over with a sort of kindly curiosity. “You are artistas, no?” she said.

Mari went toward her suddenly, took her hand and clasped it. “Thank you,” she said gratefully, almost with a sob in her throat. “Thank you — for calling us that.”

Jones, with a quick and concerned side-look at her, gently eased the landlady out, closed the door after her.

He turned and they smiled at each other. Bravely, weakly, falteringly.

“Last stop, all off,” he said and dragged open the knot of his necktie.

“Could you use a drink?” he asked her.

She shook her head. Not yet. “I don’t want to start that too soon. I’ve got an idea I’ll be requiring a private distillery of my own, once I really get going on it.”

He tried the shutters, against the landlady’s injunction; quickly slapped them together again, rubbed his chin. “Ow!” he exclaimed ruefully. “Believe it or not, that positively stings.”

She started to laugh.

He didn’t like it from the first sound of it. It wasn’t funny laughter. It pulled at her too much.

It grew and grew and grew.

“Don’t. Cut it out.” He took her by the shoulders and tried to hold her steady, firm her.

A rational sentence unexpectedly came through the geyser of merriment. “I can’t stop, Max. Try and help me, Max. I can’t stop.”

“You’re hysterical. I don’t know how to.” He tried sealing her mouth with his hand, but that wouldn’t do it.

“Here, hold onto me. Lean against me.”

He stroked her hair. She kept laughing into him, laughing into him.

“I know. I know it’s tough. I know it’s lousy.”

Then the tears came. It was as though he had turned a key in her.

He let her cry all the laughter away, wash it out of herself.

“Why’re you crying?” he asked her soothingly at last.

“Because you’re you, and because I’m me. And because life is — what it is.”

That’s a good enough reason to cry. That’s a good enough reason for anyone.

2

It was filled, and it looked worse filled than it had empty. All outlines were soft, there was so much smoke. And the fans going full-tilt in the ceiling, only took it from one place and sent it another, instead of taking it away altogether. It was a dive, and the squirming, wriggling forms of life that infested it belonged below the ground, should never have come up out of it. Maggots with rouged lips, dark holes for eyes, in dance-shifts of fuchsia, green and tangerine; blind worms, invisible slits for eyes, seeming to try to climb down inside their own glasses. Wavering together, in static dance. You couldn’t tell when they were dancing, when they were not.

She leaned over the rail. “It sounds like a boiler-factory.”

“It’s not a court sentence, you know. You only have to say the word and—”

“We’re giving a show here tonight. If they don’t want to pay attention to it, they don’t have to. It’ll still be there, in back of all the noise.”

“Okay, I’ll start you.” He stopped three steps down, looked around and up at her. “Don’t get too near any of the ringside tables if you can help it,” he cautioned her. “They look like a handy kind of crowd.”

“I’ll stay out in the middle. If there is a middle. Break me into the first chorus from the top of the stairs.”

He went on down, crossed to the beat-up upright. Almagorda was standing by it, waiting to announce them.

“Quiet them down a little, can’t you?” Jones said out of the side of his mouth.

“That coam when she start. I hope. Is no use trying to before.”

He made the introduction bi-lingually. “Señores y senoritas. Ladiss en gentlemon.” And then on from there.

Jones threaded a soft-pitched accompaniment into it from mid-point on, and then brought it in crescendo as he finished.

She was coming down the stairs now. No spotlight. Jones stole a look at her, sideface, then went back to his business.

The noise was beginning to tone down. The piano-notes, steadily going upward, were beginning to top it now.

We’ve got it licked, he said to himself.

He could feel her moving around just in back of him, staying close to him. He could feel the air move, and once a tendril of her costume clambered over his arm and whisked away again.

They were pretty quiet now, as quiet as any better-type audience had ever been. Even the underdog understands death. Maybe more so than his betters; it’s closer to him most of the time.

She went back to the stairs for the finish, and took it there. They’d discarded the full-length fall; the floor was impossibly filthy, and also pretty badly splintered. She let herself expire there, supported by the stair-rail.

Notes that he wasn’t striking began to sound off from the floor; clinkers.

“Pick the moaney up, the moaney up!” Almagorda urged behind the back of his hand. “Otherwise you meek them sore. They think—”

Jones jumped from the bench. “Any picking up of money off the floor that’s going to be done around here,” he said grimly, “I’ll do it, not her.”

Almagorda watched him for a minute. “You doan do it ri’. You suppose to smile when you do it. You go around with sore face.”

“Smile? I’d like to throw it right in their kissers!” he vowed sullenly, and ran nimbly up the stairs, giving them his back without taking any bows.

When he burst into the scabrous dressing room, he dashed the coins against the wall and made them seem like flying sequins. It was pretty but it was untidy. “What are we, a couple of Bowery stumble-burns diving into the sawdust for butts?”

“It’s just Rome; do as they do.”

“I can’t take it, Mari. I can’t let you.”

“Come here, kiss me.” He branded her with raging, white-hot lips, but she didn’t seem to feel any pain. “We’re going to play out this contract. You can make a thing hard for yourself, or you can make it easy. You can make it important, or unimportant. If I dropped my glove or my handkerchief to the floor you’d pick it up for me. Well, you’re just... picking up my earnings for me, that’s all.”

“Logic,” he scowled scornfully. But for the second time that night he started picking money up from the floor.

You’re in a blue cotton wrapper with white cranes and chrysanthemums that came out from Japan, and he’s gone, and the room smells of stale face powder and stale cigarette smoke and baked tin roof, and you begin. You hold your glass and you begin.

The landlady knocks and she wants to know if you’d like to have the bed made up. You tell her no. No, leave it. Tonight when you’re working, she can come in and make it up.

She picks up her tin bucket and goes away again. You don’t hear her, she’s in felt slippers, but you hear the bucket, as if it were going away under its own power. A ghost-bucket. Cluck, cluck, clonk.

After that, it’s very quiet. Too quiet.

You put a record on, and you sit down there, you and your glass, and you dream. With your eyes wide open. Revery music. Music from out of the past. Things that speak to you alone. That whisper low, so no one else can hear.

Say, What do you Want to Make those Eyes at me for?... A cigarette hopped to the ground, and he stepped out from under the tree where he’d been waiting.

“Hello.”

He laughed. “I bet you don’t even know what a telephone is.

“Gee,” he burst out animatedly, “I’d like to take you around with me, show you T. V. sets and frigidaires. Think what you would do to Paris.”

She moved in closer. “But above all, show me love.”

“Why did you fall for me like this, anyway?”

“I don’t want you smart. I just want you the way you are.”

“I should’ve quit while I was ahead.”

He put his arm around her, and she leaned her head against his shoulder, and they strolled along like that, in and out of drippings of moon-glow that ran down their backs as they moved along.

“Boy, that moon! It’s making me do things. Like this. And this.”

“But watch me on the curves, honey. Dangerous curves ahead.”

“I’ll go around them with you.”

“I’m in a Jaguar and you’re in a jaloppy. It’s a shame to do this to you.”

Say, what do you want to make those eyes at me for,

When they don’t mean what they say?

They make me glad, they make me sad,

They make me want a lot of things I’ve never had.

And what do you want to fool around with me for...

Another drink, another record, another telecast from the past — moving, breathing, lighted-up, just as though it were real.

Someone to Watch Over Me.

“Here come the boys off the bandstand,” Bee said. “Keep count in the glass, now.”

Trumpet went by, clarinet went by, steel guitar went by. Even Max went by with a paper cup of coca cola.

“How many did you count?” Bee asked her.

“Six,” said Mari.

“Never mind telling me who’s missing,” Bee said, “I’m way ahead of you. Is that your hairbrush? Can I borrow it for a minute? He’s standing down there lighting her cigarette, bent way over with his heinie sticking out.

“I’ll pay you for the broken hairbrush,” Bee promised.

“I never can tell if they are or aren’t,” Bradley tried to explain, rubbing himself. “So when I look at them like that, all I’m doing is wondering if they are or aren’t.”

“If you look at them, brother, they are all right!” Bee brayed.

“I’m crazy in love with him,” she whispered to Mari. “Crazy in love with him.”

To my heart he carries the key...

I hope that he turns out to be,

Someone who’ll watch over me.

Remember Me?

“You can get up from your knees,” she told him disdainfully. “My maid takes care of that.”

“You gave my candy to the doorman.”

“I shouldn’t have, I wouldn’t want to contaminate him.”

“You gave my flowers to the hospital.”

“They made me sick.”

“You gave my perfume to your maid.”

“She has the cheapest taste.”

“You sent my diamond watch back to the jewelers.”

“I knew the time already, and since I wasn’t going any place with you, I didn’t need to know it any more exactly than I did.”

“Couldn’t you leave your knife out of me in one place, at least?”

“For heaven’s sake, what do I want with pork?”

“What was that?” her maid cried out, terrified. “Look how it made all the lights shake!”

“Maybe there was someone out there just now who hates walls,” Mari shrugged.

For I’m the chap who has the key to your front door, And I’m the guy you go and buy your groceries for, Yes, I’m the man you save your goodnight kisses for, Re-mem-ber me?

I’m in the Mood for Love—

They’d made a record of it, once, the boys and he.

This same record she was holding in her hand right now, just going to play. That was he, he and the boys, on there! Those sounds, that music. And in a little while Bee’s voice would come on, and sing the words. Remember Bee? (Whatever happened to her? Where is she now?)

It brings back a night in New York, back at the very beginning. Before the climb had started, while they were still marking time. A night when she’d had him all to herself. Almost.

There was a ring at the doorbell of Bee and Bradley’s flat. They were looking after her there. They were both out someplace, and she was alone there. She got up, and put something around her, and went to see who it was.

He was standing out there, good-natured, foolish, the worse for wear. He didn’t do that much, and this was between engagements anyway. He made a lovely lush. Some men get fighty, brutal; he on the other hand he got tractable as a puppy. He had this record under his arm, this one, now; just newly pressed. She never did find out, then or later, what had brought him there, what had made him stray toward their door that night. There was a record-player there, and maybe he’d wanted to try out the new side on it. One thing she could be sure of, it wasn’t her. He only identified her, remembered who she was, after a brief pause, and with some little concentration. “Oh, you’re our kid. You’re our little make-with-the-muscles. Thass who you are. You look diff’rent in that bathrobe.”

He leaned against her, and she transported him, on the lean, over to a chair, and let him go on doing his leaning in that. He was so friendly and confidential, not like when he was sober. He made her an equal, opened his heart to her, entrusted her with all his confidences. How he’d won twenty-seven dollars from the boys at poker couple nights ago, and how he’d selected this oldie to record and he thought it was going to do a lot for them (she put it on for him then and there, and from then on he wouldn’t let her take it off the turntable); and how she reminded him of Marie, just like Marie, just like her. This gave her a bad moment, but it turned out Marie was his first sweetheart, back in Elkhart, and had two children now.

She could even boss him. She tried it a little, daringly, and it worked, he obeyed her! That made her glow all over. It was just like being his wife.

She said, “You stay in that chair. You be quiet now,” with mock severity, and she went in to make him some black coffee. She came back to the door, and said “What did I tell you? Did I tell you not to move?” and clapped her hands at him twice, and he sank meekly back again.

She brought the coffee in, and knelt down on the floor beside him, and fed it to him spoon by spoon. “Open. Now swallow. Now close.” And it was a love-scene, complete. Her first.

He said, “When you grow up, you’re gonna be wunnaful.”

“I am grown up now,” she answered rebukingly. But that went over his head.

He said, “Can I stay here? Feels good here. Wushja have any objections if I stayed here? I wanna be a gentlemen about it, buss sure comptable here.”

She said, so low and modestly he probably could not have heard it at all, “Well, legally, we’re sort of married in a way, after all. And I could... I could — Bee has this big couch out here, she and Bradley could—”

She even helped him go to bed. Up to a point, that is. Got down and took off his shoes for him. Then went to the door and threatened, “I’m coming back in five minutes, and I want to find you under those covers and quiet!”

“Yes’m,” he said muffledly, and she had to hang onto the door-knob with both hands to keep from going back in there and giving him a kiss. At last, at last; someone of your own, to love and order around. What was the difference if it was the liquor, she would have settled for that; she would have kept him pickled a year if she could have.

Then when the five minutes was nearly up, the doorbell rang again. She thought it was Bee and Brad, and she ran to tell them; she knew how glad they’d both be for her sake.

But it wasn’t. It was a strange girl.

And she showed Mari how to really boss a man. Not like a kitten, like a bobcat.

“Is he here?” she demanded, and then she walked straight through and slammed the bedroom door behind her. Mari didn’t have the nerve to open it and go in there after her.

Then in a minute or two she flung it open and brought I him out with her, shoes back on. “If you want to relax so bad,” she growled, “I got everything you need for it, right where I am. You don’t need to go ’round ringing on doorbells!”

He said to Mari on the side, in passing, “Keep the record on. I’ll be back. You ’n’ me’ll listen to it.” And he winked at her.

“Yeah, he’ll be back,” promised his captor drily, “when I get my first gray hairs. I’ll wheel him around to you again and leave him at the door.” And she hauled him (off, like an over-friendly puppy who’s too familiar with Strangers to suit his owner.

And the record stayed on, and played on, and played on, while the tears dribbled down one to a note. Tears in four-four time. While she crouched there, sideswept on the floor, with her cheek pressed disconsolately against the console.

She wouldn’t let it stop. Because he’d said he’d be back. Because it was magic, it was the spell you cast, the words you said, the wish you made, that would bring him back. It had to work, it had to!

Simply because you’re near me, Funny but when you’re near me—

Then it was daylight, and Bee’s arm reached out above her downcast head and turned it off. And Bee raised her gently to her feet, and held her against her, and patted her shoulder.

And he hadn’t come back after all. The magic spell of the record had been a bust. I’m in the Mood for Love.

The bottle’s empty now, and the glass is too. The record is going whissssh, at that blank groove at the end where there’s no more sound. Just going round and round. Like you, like life.

Revery-music. Ghost-melodies. Music from out of the past. Whispering low, to you, to you alone. Breaking all over again your already broken heart.

3

And then suddenly one night a tight-packed roll, paper.

They didn’t throw paper currency; paper can’t be thrown.

He broke his rule and looked at it, even before reaching the stairs. It was paper currency, tightly rolled. A rubber band had been slipped over it to hold it in place. It was American, even the glimpse at it that he’d taken was enough to tell that.

From the stairs, his eyes roved the room. Who in this place could afford a gesture like that?

His searching glance found them right away. They were easy to find. They stood out conspicuously from the rest of the ragged crowd. They had a small table to themselves. That was a feat in itself in this place. There were two of them. Both men, both young. And yet the two of them were stag; they had no women with them. That was even more of a feat. But they must have wanted it that way, for it to be that way. They must have used a flyswatter, when they’d first come in.

One of them had on a striped jersey, with short sleeves. What was called a Basque shirt. That and a rakish yachting cap. But he wasn’t just some oiler or merchant mariner spruced up. The three-figure gold watch-bracelet on his wrist did away with that notion. He had a gold cigarette-case split open on the table in front of him, both leaves thin as the cutting-edge of an adze. He had champagne in his glass; he wasn’t drinking it, just leasing the table with it. He was just being informal. Just slumming.

His tablemate had on the dark trousers and light mess-jacket of tropical evening dress. Broadway musical comedy version, not what was customary down here. Complete even to a cummerbund. He was about thirty, a very beat thirty, a thirty that showed hard wear.

He raised his glass toward her, and tried to salute her. He only saluted the back of her heel, as it lifted itself up off the topmost step and whisked from sight. Jones liked that; it was as though she’d given him a kick in his champagne glass.

He closed the dressing-room door after him and dumped out the take. “This was in it just now,” he told her. He scraped the rubber band off, unrolled the wad, and showed her. Five fives. Twenty-five dollars, American. “From those two fellows in the costume-party get-up. Did you see them?”

“I don’t see anyone,” she said.

It didn’t reassure him any. They had seen her.

“They’re loaded, and we’re broke. That still makes it bad taste. They’re only showing us that they’re loaded and we’re broke.”

“We’re not broke,” she said gently. “We have two hundred sixty-five dollars that we’ve worked for, all expenses taken out, and two weeks from Friday we can leave here.”

“Now a note will come to the door, asking you to come down to their table and join them.”

“Which will be refused—”

The knock had already sounded before she quite got to the period.

Even he had to laugh a little.

He went over and opened the door.

“Dispense, Señor. Los dos Caballeros—”

“We know; we saw them,” he cut the waiter off.

The card said Hugh Fontaine, engraved. And then, “Would like you to be his table-guest” had been added.

“That burn,” he said savagely. “I’ve heard of him. Alcohol and oil oozing out at every pore. With a train of girls carrying blotters following him around everywhere, doing their best to mop him dry.” He slanted the card to tearing angle.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “I’ll handle it.”

She took the card, a pencil from the waiter, and wrote five words, three of them underlined. “Please excuse Mrs. Maxwell Jones.”

“Shall we send the money back?” she asked him.

“No, that would just be returning bad taste in kind.” He handed the entire twenty-five to the waiter. “Tell the gentlemen you’ve been tipped. Don’t accept anything more from them now, Ramon.”

“That’s the only way to live,” she said gratefully, when he reclosed the door and turned back to her, “That’s still the only way to live. The way we always have. The grand gesture. Way up, or way down. Never just middling, flat.”

She came over and kissed him.

“And I love you for the way you are. Stay the way you are. Be broke if you have to, but don’t give up the grand gesture.”

“Through with your makeup? Shall we go?”

“Yes,” she said. “Let’s go home and go to sleep. We’re just two working people, and we’ve finished work for tonight.”

It hadn’t been the right technique. They were there again the next night; same table, same gold cigarette-case, same snubbed champagne.

They didn’t throw any money this time; at least they’d gotten that much through their heads.

He liked that even less. At least you can do something about money; give it back, or tear it up, or throw it away. They were minding their own business. And the trouble was, their business was her.

One of the coins rolled too near their table, and he deliberately passed it up, wouldn’t go after it; wouldn’t bend down that close to their feet and pick something up from the floor. He was half hoping one of them would do it for him, and then he’d have a reason for smashing him in the face.

One foot started out toward the coin, to push it closer over within his reach. Another foot came down heavily on top the first, and pinned it where it was.

The face that was doing the wincing, when he glanced up, was that of the wearer of the Basque shirt. That placed Fontaine for him. The other was just a stooge.

They applauded till their hands smoked, Fontaine and stooge.

He closed the door. “They were there again.”

“I didn’t see them the first time, so how would I know them the second?” She was only trying to make him feel good; he knew that.

The knock made even faster time than the night before; it hit in about three-and-a-half minutes.

“Station break,” he said bitterly, and opened the door as if he were wringing the neck of the knob.

This time it was Almagorda in person, and pop-eyed with the importance of his tidings.

“I have a special invitation for the senorita — and for you too senor-for to come downstair’ to private party.” He made criss-cross motions with excited palms. “Just special party for you alone. Is nobody else going to be there.”

“How chummy,” she murmured in the background, swabbing her face.

“Not tonight, Joe,” Jones said with deadly calm. “That’s the message. ‘Some other night, maybe, but not tonight, Joe.’ You won’t understand it, but maybe they will. Now kill the draft.”

“But you don’t onderstan. Luke.” He winnowed through a sheaf of green bills. “He have, how you say, rent my whole place for rest of night. Is shot or the doors. I have to get or and say to everyone, Place is closing now. It has been taken over for private party.”

Jones gave him foot-instructions, as if he were a stage-manager rehearsing a hoofer. “Back a little with that one the left. That’s it. Now the other one, even them up. He shot the door home and the interview had been cut short.

“He’s a little bit corny, isn’t he?” he suggested. “They used to do that back in the Floradora period, didn’t they? Rent out the whole place for the evening—”

“Oh, I wouldn’t take it personally,” she said lightly. “Maybe the man’s interested in real estate.”

The second knock was very polite, unassuming. If a knock can be called charming, it was a charming knock. It’s your door, and you don’t have to open it; but I’d appreciate it if you would.

“What’s that,” he asked her, “a butterfly with velvet bumpers?”

“It seems Mr. Fontaine can’t take no for an answer.”

He went ahead and opened it, with one more offside commentary. “‘High life behind the scenes at the La Perla Café,’ or ‘Her Big Moment.’” Still, that knock would have opened almost any door.

The old young man of thirty in the Basque shirt was standing there. At close range his face was even more wizened than it had seemed downstairs. He must have been born wrinkled, thought Jones. He was holding the yachting cap deferentially upended against his stomach.

“Will you let me introduce myself?” he said. Strictly to Jones, as though she weren’t there at all, to make it all the more difficult to resent. How can you refuse to let a man give you his name, anyway? What is more respectful than that?

“I’m Hugh Fontaine, Mr. Jones, and I came up to tell you how very much I enjoyed watching your work just now. Am I being too annoying?”

They were performers, after all. He had them there. Maybe they both knew he had them, but he had them just the same. It was no slap in the face, it was no kick in the shins.

No answer from Jones. “Thank you,” restrainedly, from her.

He wouldn’t get out of the doorway. And he hadn’t done anything to warrant closing the door in his face.

“We were just going home,” said Jones. Then he added, stingily, “My wife, Mrs. Jones.”

“Good evening,” he said, with enough unction to have lubricated even Jones’ stiff neck.

“Good evening.”

And now they couldn’t shut the door in his face; they’d met him. They still didn’t ask him in; there was only one chair, anyway, and she was on it.

“I couldn’t persuade the two of you to join us downstairs?”

She answered for them. “I’m sorry, Mr. Fontaine, we’ve already given the performance. We never give more than one performance a night in this heat.”

He was horrified. “Oh, but you don’t understand. What did that fat manager do, garble my message? I’m asking you to join us as my guests.”

They neither of them answered immediately.

He went on without waiting. “Well, I’ll put my cards on the table. I have a business proposition I’d like to offer you. What I’d really like is to discuss a business proposition with you.”

“A business proposition?” Jones said warily.

She was ready to go now. She came over and stood with the two of them in the doorway.

“You see, my yacht, the Myrmidon, is anchored right out there. I’m down here with a party of friends on a cruise, and I’m giving a big party on board, a blow-out, on Friday night next. Now, do you think I could persuade you...?” He let the rest of it trail off, feeling his way. “To exhibit that dance,” she supplied, brittlely.

“I don’t think we’re interested,” Jones said tersely. “Yes, but you’re doing it here, aren’t you?”

“It’s riot quite the same thing. Not in the original version. And the, the type of audience we get here, doesn’t know what it is, isn’t aware of what they’re seeing. It’s just another cabaret dance, to most of them.”

He was used to getting his own way. “Look, the fee is no object. I want this party to be a success—”

“Most of yours are, Mr. Fontaine,” she said sweetly. “We’ve read about them so often — afterward.”

He refused to take offense. “No, nothing like that. As a matter of fact, most of those things they write about are exaggerated. These feature-writers don’t know what else to write about, so to turn out copy they always come back to me. ‘Old Reliable.’ I’m far more sinned against than sinning, believe me that’s the truth of it.”

“But anyway,” she smiled, turning away to go on down the stairs, “the word ‘sin’ is implicated, one way or another.”

Jones went after her, with a compressed “Nightfontaine” that made one word of it. Like a tight-wadded spitball thrown at him.

Fontaine trailed downstairs behind them, with the air of someone who has received a temporary setback but has by no means given up his purpose altogether.

She had inadvertently halted for a moment, in surprise. “So this is what it looks like with its crowd off.”

He took advantage of that to reform the little group of three they had just now consisted of upstairs. So that he was still with them, in spite of themselves.

His tablemate, the only remaining person in the place, had risen and posted himself behind one of the chairs with headwaiter-etiquette, ready to move it out for her.

Fontaine shook his head to him with a wan smile. “Mrs. Jones doesn’t like me,” he said. “She’s given herself every opportunity of forming an unbiased opinion — all of a minute, minute and a half — and I just don’t rate. Put the chair back, Steve. We’ll have to drink our little toast to her by ourselves. We’ll mean it just as sincerely, but we’ll have to do it without her.”

She gave Jones an expressive look, as if to say “You tell me how to get out of this, if you know a way!”

“You know every grip and hold, don’t you?” she said to Fontaine with a sort of mellowing coldness, if the combination is to be imagined. “Who trained you, Strangler Lewis? You don’t care how you do it, just so long as you pin them down.”

“I’m a gentleman,” he protested, with a wry grimace of amusement that somehow took the corn out of it. “I wouldn’t dream of pinning you down—”

“Well, I’m a gentleman too.” she said firmly, “and you have pinned me down.” She went over and accepted the seat.

“And I’m not a gentleman,” said Jones bluntly, “so I’ll sit in on this to make sure you are a gentleman.”

The two men laughed with insincere uproariousness at this.

When strangers laugh at your jokes, Jones told himself, keep your eye on them.

“Mrs. Jones, this is Captain Randall, my skipper.” He’d snapped his fingers offside while he was making the introduction, and there was champagne waiting there before he’d finished it. Just like that.

“Homage to a very lovely lady,” he said, rising with filled glass.

“You’d better be more specific,” she suggested. “You probably know so many, Mr. Fontaine.”

“I only know one tonight,” he said gallantly.

“Big lie or a short memory,” she said mercilessly.

“We both enjoyed your performance so much—” Randall started to say to her, trying to distract her attention.

He failed. “No,” she protested suddenly. “Now wait a minute, Mr. Fontaine. What is that you’re writing?”

He was scribbling with a fountain pen along a pale-blue oblong on the table before him, that had come out of a check-folder.

“It’s not for you,” he lied smoothly. “Look, I’ll slip it under the bottom of my glass when I’m finished, like this, and let it stay there. Now, that isn’t anywhere near you, is it? I always write checks like this, when I’m sitting at a table. The two things seem to go together.”

“And do you also always wink to Mr. Randall on the side, while you’re doing it, like you did this time? ‘Ten thousand dollars,’” she read from it, upside down. “The cover charge here at La Perla, no doubt.”

Back in their own room Jones said to her, “You get his angle, don’t you?”

“Something more than just wanting me to dance?”

“What does he really care about the dance itself. He’s a betting man. He’s known all over the world for his crazy bets. He’ll bet on which of two clouds hits the sun first. On which of two raindrops beats the other down a windowpane. On two matchsticks burning all the way down to their ends. His whole life’s one long bet.”

“And now on someone dying.” She smiled bleakly.

“His check’s in my handbag right now,” she said. “I’m not supposed to know I brought it home with me. I saw him when he slipped it in. The other one was trying to glass reflected his hand, dipping in and out. A very swollen hand, but I could make out what it was doing.” She handed it to him. “Open it and see if I’m not right.”

He opened it. Took it out, glanced at it. “Ten thousand,” he said. “Why didn’t you sing out?”

“He would have only kept on insisting, and I was getting tired of it. There’s nothing final about it’s being in there. We can either keep it or we can tear it up.”

He gave it a little swirl around on the tabletop and left it lying there. “What do we do, tear it up? Or swallow our pride?”

“How much pride can you swallow?”

“You’re the one dances, you’re the one decides.” He turned away, flung off his necktie, swung it like a lariat around a closet-door hook. He turned back again presently. It was no longer in sight. “Where is it?” he asked.

She laughed at her own phrase. “It’s in the bag.”

4

Fontaine’s private motor-launch was waiting for them at the landing, complete with saluting deck-officer, when they got out of the taxi at the waterfront.

“Transportation too,” Jones murmured. “Am I supposed to salute him back? I don’t know the regulations on yachts. Never having owned one.”

She said, as they sat down together in the stem, “Who wants a yacht?”

They took off with a sound like a jet of seltzer leaving a siphon, rocking a little at first, then steadying almost to the feel of motionlessness.

The water was paved with illusionary floating blocks of scarlet, ruby, green and yellow and white, like multicolored tiles awash, from the lights of all the craft anchored about in the bay. The launch seemed to slash its way through them, leaving a black wake in this case instead of a white one. Then the phantom mosaics coalesced again behind it, closed their ranks, scarlet, ruby, green, yellow, white. They made it like confetti-colored water.

His yacht was one of the furthest out of all, and it was like a little self-contained blob of sunrise coming up out of the dark water, it glowed so. It throbbed and vibrated, and when they got in close, with a wide, scythe-like sweep, the throbbing became dance-music. An orchestra was playing “Enjoy Yourself, It’s Later Than You Think,” and the restless shadows of dancers could be seen, upside down, milling around on the underside of the white canopy that stretched across the stern.

“Mr. Fontaine’s theme song,” she observed wryly.

Fontaine came to greet them at the head of the Jacob’s ladder. For her he had both hands, for Jones just a superficial nod.

“Now you’re here the night will really begin.” He must have said it a thousand times before, she supposed, on a thousand other nights, at a thousand other parties, it came out so glibly.

“This way. Let me show you.” He guided her with an arm about her waist. He didn’t leave it there continuously; just started her off with it, then took it away, then brought it back again once or twice to keep her going in the right direction, then let it slip off again. But her waist was on its mind.

Jones followed close behind them, watching its ups and downs with a fairly unsympathetic eye.

“I’ve had the after deck cleared for your performance. There, where you see them dancing right now. We’ll bring out chairs in a little while and seat them. And I thought, roll back the canopy, so that the spotlight can reach you from the deck-roof above. Will that be all right? You don’t mind dancing under the open sky?”

“I think it will be very effective. You can’t wire stars like that to a roof or ceiling, for any amount of money.”

“I got the exact color slide for you that you specified. I couldn’t get one here in the Zone, so I had to have it flown down from the States. On loan; it has to be back Monday.”

He’d taken them down below, and into a stateroom. Jones still the rearguard.

He took champagne from a gilt bucket and poised it interrogatively over goblets ranged at the ready.

“I never drink before I dance,” she refused with a smile.

His interrogation of Jones was just an inquiring hitch of the head, as though this postscript bored him.

“Nup,” Jones said, and made his voice sound equally bored.

Fontaine drank a little himself, just as a token to toast them with. “To a knockout,” he said.

“Thank you. We’ll try not to disappoint.”

He looked around. “I think you’ll find everything— Would you like a maid? I have one for the ladies.”

“I can manage faster alone.”

He went to the door. Then he came partially forward again. He seemed to want to say something further.

“You are... you are — going to do that thing of yours, aren’t you?”

“What thing?” she said, intentionally obtuse.

“I mean, you are going to do the real one, the one that’s loaded — not spike it in any way.”

“It’s pretty grim for a shipboard party,” she pointed out.

“But that’s the whole purpose of my — inviting you.”

“You don’t have to say ‘inviting.’ ‘Hiring.’”

“Inviting with pay,” compromised Jones sardonically.

“That’s for you to decide, Mr. Fontaine. You’re giving the party.”

He clenched his fist. “Then I want it with the lid off! Give it the works. Go to town on it.”

“You’re not afraid — something may happen?” she smiled.

His eyes glittered at her for a moment, in a look that was almost feverish. “I’m afraid — something may not,” he said, quietly but distinctly.

She stared at Jones, after he’d gone.

“Did you hear that?”

“I told you he was betting on it,” he said. “He’ll bet on anything that comes along; he’s well-known for that. Horses, fighters, dogs — now this. If you ask me, I think the guy’s completely off his rocker. Not just peculiar, completely batty.”

“What was he trying to do, fix me ahead of time?”

“Just protect his bets, I suppose, by making sure you’d dance on the up and up.”

She practically wrenched her dress off her shoulder, as she began to get ready.

“That make you sore?”

“No,” she replied resentfully. “But it does make me feel a little bit like something under a blanket being fed lumps of sugar.”

There was a knock on the door. Jones opened it.

A statuesque blonde all in white walked in past him and closed it behind her. She lowered a wisp of tulle from her hair, said: “Good evening, I’m Constance Ryan. You’re the young lady who — knocks them dead, I believe.”

“I try not to,” Mari said neutrally.

“Could I have a word with you alone?” Her eyes flicked at Jones, then back again.

“He’s my husband.”

She was amiably patronizing. Like when you go down to visit the steerage, or something. “Oh, I didn’t know you were man and wife.”

“Yes, we — saw others doing it, so we thought we’d copy them and do it ourselves.”

Miss Ryan was too intent on her own purpose to be even aware she’d been pricked. “Can you control it? It doesn’t run away with you — does it?” she asked aridly.

Jones had gone over to the stateroom-window to make himself unobtrusive, was smoking out through it.

“Our being man and wife?” Mari misunderstood sweetly.

“You’re playing with me,” said the blonde impatiently.

“Oh, the dance,” corrected Mari. “I couldn’t say. I honestly couldn’t say, because I’m not sure myself. Is that what you wanted to know, Miss Ryan?”

“You could say!” snapped the blonde.

“Really, you’re extremely kind to take this much interest,” Mari said gratefully. “It’s just in the interests of research, I guess.”

The blonde held her wrist out.

“How do you like my bracelet?” she said abruptly.

“I hadn’t noticed it until now.”

“Well-notice it.”

“It’s noticed,” notified Mari, cutting it dead with one swift movement of the eyes.

“You keep it as security,” the blonde said, starting to take it off. “After the dance, you get five thousand.”

“Five thousand what, for what?”

Miss Ryan gave her tongue a castanet-like snap of exasperation. “Let’s cut out this kindergarten routine. You’re of age. You’ve been around longer than that. No sense making any bones about it. I have a bet of twenty-five thousand on the dance — not to show. I’m willing to give you five, just so I can collect the other twenty.”

“I don’t play that way,” Mari told her, almost roughly. The blonde drew a sharp breath. “You’re kind of difficult to talk to, aren’t you?”

“Very. Then why not stop trying, that’s all you have to do. It would suit me fine.”

The blonde gave her bracelet a discarded shove back higher up on her arm. “Is there anything else I’ve got you like?” she persisted desperately.

“Your nerve.”

“Get out, lady,” Jones suddenly ordered, and went over and held the door open for her.

It was a difficult audience to dance to. Some were on deck-chairs and salon-chairs brought forward for the purpose, some were down at floor level, actually seated on the deck itself, and by far the greater number, most of them men, were standing up. Those who were unattached to any particular spot kept moving about freely, too freely. Hands kept going into breast-or back-pockets, and bets were being exchanged all over the place. In front of one of the ship’s officers there was actually a line of three or four, waiting their turn single file, as at a ticket-window.

She was standing at the back of the crowd, trying to make herself as inconspicuous as possible while she waited for her cue.

Two girls came wavering by, the worse for wear. One had a stray wisp of hair dangling down over her eye, and kept blowing up at it to try to get it out of the way. They stared, first at her, then inquiringly at one another.

“That her?” one said in a highball laryngitis.

“Must be,” said the other.

“I think I better double up on my parlay. She looks to me like she could.”

“Where you going to get the money from?”

“Man,” was the explicit answer. “Same one as before. You want to come in on it with me?”

“Neh, got men of my own I haven’t even used yet.”

They went back to wherever it was they’d just come from, leaving a distinct trace on the air as though a spirit lamp had just been swung all around, then emptied out bodily on the deck.

Fontaine was going forward now to introduce her. The band gave him a fanfare for attention.

Miss Ryan was nowhere in sight.

The cue had to be relayed. She caught Max’s eye and nodded. He in turn caught the band leader’s eye and nodded. The percussion sounded an opening chord. She started forward.

It was a ridiculous way to enter. She came out at a quick little run, to bridge the awkward preliminary, circled to face them, and stood still.

They quieted a little. Just momentary curiosity.

The rest was the performance.

Miss Ryan had reappeared in the audience. She was standing there at Fontaine’s elbow, brimming glass of champagne poised low almost at her hip. His arms were bent at chest-level; he was struggling with something held between his two clasped hands. Something he was trying to force open or pry apart. She couldn’t tell what it was. A cigarette-case, a balky lighter, it could have been anything.

Faces and lanterns and thin white deck-stanchions in a receding row that were like chalk-lines against the licorice-black night, all started to quiver and wave and ooze, like images seen through heat-refraction. But that was because she was writhing, herself.

Then the outlines coalesced once more, like patches of oil running together, and everything was sharply etched, dry-point etched. Miss Ryan was just raising her champagne-glass to her lips. Fontaine’s hands were gone now, back inside his pockets.

Mari veered toward her suddenly, swiped circularly at the glass. Miss Ryan was holding her hand out empty, where the glass had just been, and the deck was sprinkled with rhinestones.

She stared first, blankly, then glowered.

The dance had come to a halt. The music trailed to a stop after it.

“He put something in that!” Mari cried. “I saw him.”

Miss Ryan glanced at him, as if dazed, then back at her again.

“You fool!” Mari exclaimed. “Don’t believe me then, if you don’t want to. Why would I tell you so?”

“The bet,” Miss Ryan whispered, as if to herself. She swung her head around to him suddenly. “Is that how you win your bets, Hugh?”

Without answering, he strode to the rail and threw something over it. Something that glinted metallically for an instant, the way a match-box or small pill-box would have. He was as matter-of-fact about it as if it were the most harmless gesture in the world.

“Do I need the money that badly?” he said, coming back to her.

“No, it isn’t the money,” she agreed bitterly. “It’s the idea of losing the bet. I know you, you wouldn’t stop at anything. It’s not just the bet with me, you know. Almost everyone on the ship had put something down on the dance — and you were the only one out of all of us that was betting the other way, that it would strike somebody down.”

He shrugged. “It was just a gag, anyway. It wasn’t anything that would have hurt you. Just knockout drops.”

“Thanks just the same,” she murmured, beginning to cry into her two hands. “That’s something I’ll never be certain about, from now on.”

Mari pushed on, her eyes averted, trying to get through the crowd to where Max was. Fontaine was suddenly standing in her way. His eyes were like pools of poison. As she stared into them, almost hypnotized, she knew for a certainty that he was deranged, whether others could tell it about him or not.

His shoulder twitched, and there was a stinging impact on Mari’s cheek.

“Keep out of things that don’t concern you! You dime-a-dozen cooch-dancer!”

It took her a moment or two to realize she’d been slapped. And by then Max had fought his way through to them. He jerked Fontaine around toward him by the back of the collar, and swung from below up, in a pulverizing haymaker. Fontaine’s head went over, his concussion-clamped teeth appearing to grin horribly, and he hit the deck with a terrible sliding sort of fall as though he were being dragged along it. And lay still, completely out for a moment.

“Max,” she pleaded. “Max. For God’s sake, get me out of here!”

He put his arm shelteringly around her, and hurried her over to the head of the ladder, through a wide path the crowd made for them, out of newborn respect for his prowess. She herself had never realized he could hit so forcefully, he was so easy-going most of the time.

The escort-officer didn’t raise a hand to him as they brushed by him. Maybe it was a blow he’d dreamed of giving, himself, many a long year.

Behind them, as if on cue, the band suddenly blared out with “Toot Toot Tootsie, Goo’bye,” to drown out the din and commotion that had started in.

5

They stood there alone on the little stone quay where the launch had deposited them. The wake of the launch, on its way back to the yacht now, made a sound like sand being poured into a tin bucket; its little stern-light bobbed and hobbled like a glistening red golf ball streaking through a black rough. Then dropped into some unsuspected hole along the course.

She didn’t make a move to go on from there; so he didn’t press her, let her be. Just stood there at her side, with his arm at her waist. The dank before-dawn breeze licking in from the harbor played with her dress; made it seem like something tattered, though it was whole.

“This is the end of something or other, Max. We can’t go any further than this.”

“We didn’t do anything,” he said sturdily. “What did we do?”

But all she said, again, was, “This is the end of something or other, Max.”

“Shall we go back to the room?”

She nodded slowly. “A woman is supposed to go indoors at night. And I have no other place to go to.”

She saw him looking around to try to sight a taxi. “Let’s walk,” she said. “It isn’t so terribly far.”

They walked along together slowly. They were like two lovers, from the back. His arm about her, her head against the turn of his shoulder. But from the front, they were like two lost people, sightless eyes staring ahead.

“You’re never going to dance again at La Perla.”

“No,” she agreed dispiritedly. “I’m never going to dance again at La Perla. You knew I was just thinking that, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I could tell.”

“So close,” she murmured, “that now we can even read one another’s thoughts without a word between us.”

“That’s marriage. We’re married in every way. We’re one. And it has nothing to do with a ring, or the words from a book.”

“Then you do share my fear, my certainty that there’s something wrong.”

“There is something wrong,” he agreed reluctantly. She caught him fiercely by the arm, pressing both her hands to it at once, as if to draw it out of him in that way.

“Let’s admit it. Let’s face it. We’re alone together. It’s night. There’s no one can hear us. Oh, let’s come out with it. It isn’t La Perla. It wasn’t that souse-party on the yacht tonight. Let’s name it. Let’s pin it down. Let’s say it out loud to each other.”

And then she drew in breath deeply. And she said it into his face, turning her own up toward it to do so.

“It’s the dance.”

He bowed his head. And that was agreement.

“It’s always been the dance.”

His head was still bowed.

“It’s ruined our lives. First it shot us way up. Then it dragged us way down.”

Their footsteps, in the quiet of the night, were like an underscoring to this monologue of despair.

Only she spoke. He didn’t have to, for she was speaking for the two of them. Finding the words that were in his heart as well.

They reached the boarding house.

They put the light on in their room, closing the shutters to forestall winged things.

She didn’t watch what he was doing, he didn’t watch what she was. And yet they never had been so aware of one another before; everything they did, was thinking of the other.

He looked finally, and she was on the bed. Still in the dress she’d come away from the party in. She was leaning over sidewise on it, as if in indolence, one arm cross-bent beneath her; and yet outlining her indolence, pulsing from it, was a tautness.

Her eyes had been waiting for him to turn her way. He’d never seen them so intense before. They fastened on his and held them, as if they were vises edged with lashes.

“There’s something I want to talk to you about. I think you already know, without hearing it. Look how rigid your neck is suddenly, you can’t move it. Look how big the black pits in the middle of your eyes have grown, until they fill nearly the whole pupil. Look how still you are standing all at once.”

“Because you’re speaking to me.”

“No. Because your heart already knows what I am going to say. Before I have even said it.”

“Tomorrow you’ll tell me.”

“No, I’ll tell you now. Now. It has to be now. Here. In the middle of the night.”

“Then tell me,” he capitulated.

She shook her head. “This isn’t a thing you talk about over cigarettes. Put it away.”

She told him the long way around, lolling there at ease, eyes thoughtfully far off in space somewhere.

“There may be something to it, there may not. You know what I’m talking about now, don’t you?”

“It,” he said crushedly.

“I’m going to know, before I drop it once and for all. That way it can never hurt us again. Will you take a chance with me?”

His face was getting paler. But very slowly, not with a sudden rush. Long-term fright, deep within you, long within you; not the swift, superficial kind, outside.

“For the sake of our love, for the sake of our happiness, for whatever future there still is left for us? Will you risk it with me?”

His tongue was frightened too. Too frightened to answer.

“Each time it’s happened in the crowd around me, disguising itself with a ‘might have been’ or a ‘might not.’ I don’t have to remind you, I don’t have to go over our little obituary list, so short, so terrible. The colored man who did Mort’s shoes, his heart had been weak from childhood, from living in a Harlem tenement. The Italian in Milan, his blood pressure was up, he ate too heavily, he’d been quarrelling violently with his daughters right as he ate his meals, for weeks and weeks before. The man in Montreal, he’d been in a Jap prison camp for over two years.

“Maybe they would have all died, at those exact moments, on those same nights, even if they’d been at home reading a book. Even if they’d been asleep, in bed.

“It’s always had its alibi. It’s always had a dozen, or fifty, or a hundred people around, to safely cover up for it. Now it’s not going to get away with it any more.

“I’ve never put it to the real test. I’ve never danced it when there was no one else around but me. All alone with it in a locked room. No one else there for it to strike. No one else there to be struck.”

“No-Mari!”

“That’s what I’m going to do now. And that’s what you’re going to let me do.”

“No! For God’s sake, don’t! Let it alone. Hasn’t it done enough to us—”

“Every word that comes from your mouth only proves that in your heart you do believe it’s deadly, you are afraid of it. You may not know this yourself, Max, but your whole reaction gives it away. We’re both living with that, that buried fear. It is a real snake after all, and not a myth; a snake that has coiled itself around our hearts and is crushing them, and gnawing steadily with poisoned bites. And now I’m going to pull its fangs.”

She started to get up slowly from the bed. And as she did so, he drew warily back a step or two, without noticing it himself. Frightened, not of her, but of the purpose she was carrying in her.

“You’re going to go outside this room. You’re going to leave me alone in it, with not another human being. I’m going to lock the door and take the key out of it. There’s not going to be another living thing inside here but me — for it to strike, if it does strike.”

Those black pits in the centers of his eyes grew larger still, until they’d swallowed up the whole pupil around them. That was the only signal of his tension, and he didn’t know he was giving it.

“I’m going to put a record on that little player we have over there in the corner. And I’m going to dance it as I’ve never danced it before. As you’ve never seen me dance it yet. With all the stops out. As they taught me to dance it in the temple; when it hadn’t become an entertainment, when it was still a prayer. With all the things in it that I’ve left out ever since.”

He kept saying no, but not with his voice; just with his head, and his soundlessly pronouncing lips.

“And when it’s done, if I’m alive, I’m going to put the key back in the door, and open it, and come out to you. And we’re never going to be afraid again, you and I. The shadow will lift. The strangeness will go. We’ll be as others, you and I. We may be poor, we may be rich; we may be good, we may be bad; we may be happy, we may be miserable; but we’ll never again be different from all the rest.”

“We’re not different now; we breathe, we speak, we eat, we love, we’re together. Oh, let’s leave it that way; don’t let’s crowd it, don’t let’s monkey around.”

“You see, you do. You do believe. Every protest you make says it for you. Says just the opposite of what you’re trying to make it say.”

“No, I don’t believe, I don’t. There isn’t anything to believe in.”

“Those drops of wet on your forehead, they believe, though. What brought them out, then, if there isn’t anything to believe in? What made them come? Ah, Max, you don’t believe; but your skin does, your pores do. And you’re inside that skin, so which one is really you?”

“But why go out of your way, why not let well enough alone, why invite— All you have to do is just not ever dance it again, keep away from it — and... and nothing will happen, it’ll let us alone. Why turn yourself into some sort of a human lightning-conductor?”

“But if there is no lightning there to strike, then the conductor is safe. And that’s what we’re trying to prove.”

She opened the door, and reached out for his hand, and tried to draw him toward it, so that he would go through.

“How long does it take me? Ten minutes. And then you won’t be afraid any more. I won’t have to see your eyes as they are now, won’t have to see that look in them any more. Don’t try to change them; that’s the one thing you can’t tell a lie with, the eyes.”

“Let me go on being afraid then. Don’t do this. It’s late, you’re tired, we’re both disheartened. Lie down and get some sleep; I’ll sit here by you, watch over you, I’ll keep the blues off you. Tomorrow I’ll take you away from here.”

“But tonight,” she insisted, “I’m auditioning. For life — or death.”

She had him backed to the open doorway now. She raised her arms past his shoulders and twined them caressingly about the back of his neck.

“Kiss me for a little while. Just so long for five or ten minutes, that’s all. Go downstairs and smoke a cigarette on the steps, like a fellow does when he’s calling for his girl and she’s not quite ready yet to go out with him. Or go down to that little place on the corner and have a drink; just one, and then come back again.”

Their lips met as though they’d never met before; as though they’d just found out what a kiss was, after longing for one another all their lives through.

She drew back slowly within the closing door-gap.

“Let me have another,” he said hauntedly. “Just one more.”

“In a minute from now,” she promised, as the narrowing door shaded his face, dimmed it, like time, like death; “as I reopen this door. Don’t be afraid, dear, don’t be afraid. I’ll be right out.”

The last note, the signature note, the throb of a drumbeat, elongated, thinned away, like a reluctant bubble clinging to the downturned mouth of a retort; then severed itself, faded, and there were no more. The needle-arm kept traveling around and endlessly around trapped in the muted groove at the end of the record, and the only sound was like dried fall leaves scraping against each other and sighing on an eddy of seasonal death. With over and over a dessicated stem snapping at the end of their sigh. Not breaking clean, just lightly snapping.

She lay inert on the floor, face down. Her flickering wrist had just fallen still atop her own head. Nothing about her moved. The dance was done. For the last of all times, the dance was done.

The needle-arm was wearying now. It struggled and it strove against the slowly ebbing record. Suddenly it fell over aslant, and had stopped. Another kind of death, a smaller one, over there on the turntable.

Silence and stillness.

Heartbeats can’t move. Thoughts can’t be heard.

But each heartbeat said, I live; I live; I live. And each heartbeat was the living testimony to its own truthful claim. And her thoughts said, timid, smothered: I’ve won. It was a lie, it was nothing. It hasn’t harmed me. It wasn’t there to harm me. Now I can feel fear going slowly away, emptying out at each pore, like night-mist, and happiness creeping on, like morning light across the floor. But lie still awhile yet, don’t make a premature move, give them time to fully change places.

Suddenly motion, the antithesis to death. Motion in a triumphant swirl. She was on her knees now, alone there in the room. Upper body straining upward, exultant, ecstatic. Her eyes were wet and beaming.

Ah, thank you, thank you, for my life and for his.

The knob on the door was turning, then turning back again. Without sound, in breathless question. Turning, then turning back again. He must be standing there close, right up against it. Too fearful to knock at it with his hand. Too unsure to call to her. Afraid if he called, there might be no answer. The turning and counterturning knob just kept pleading to her silently.

She went across to the door on her knees. Capable of rising, but in too great a hurry to do so. Traveled on her knees, “walked” on the points of them, arms triumphantly outstretched toward the door and him.

“I’m coming. Darling, can you hear me? I’m coming. I’m still in here. I’m almost there — I’m there!”

Then at the door rose to the full height she’d denied herself before, and face close against it, could hear the sound of his breathing just on the other side. His frightened, pleading breathing just on the other side. Breaths as close as the breaths that escort a kiss to its resting place.

“Max, Max, can you hear me? I’m right here on the other side. It’s over, it’s through, I’m opening the door. Answer me, Max. Tell me you hear me. It takes such a long time to get a key in—”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m all right. Don’t you hear me. It was a lie, it wasn’t true, it’s gone. Get your arms ready, I’m coming into them—”

The door-seam parted narrowly and they looked at one another. The eyes, the mirrors of the soul.

His arms were held out toward her, to claim her. She threw the door out of the way, cast it aside as though it were some loose, unattached plank or panel encumbering her. The opening was wide now, very wide, full width. Wide enough for life to come back in through, wide enough for death to scurry out through, only seeking to make its own escape from a place where it had been worsted.

She flung herself into his arms, and they claimed and held her.

Their kiss was like an inchoate, stammering attempt to express pure flame by faltering word of mouth. Transcribe ecstasy into a clay hieroglyph.

“We’ve won. We’ve won. We start over. Happiness begins—”

His arms could not maintain themselves. As though her shoulders, her sides, were oiled, were traced with some unguent, they slipped down, encircling her in a noose, a bracelet, a slipknot, of love. And with them, down went his head. Too low to kiss her any more, or for her to kiss.

To her breast at first, as if in a deep hungry devotion, or in sorrow, or in search of solace. Then to her waist, sodden, or like a penitent.

The surfacing of the floor thudded out dolorously, something turned lazily over upon it and settled to rest, and his face lay upturned now, across her two feet.

His eyes were open but they didn’t see her any more.

His face was turned upon her but it didn’t know her any. And before she had made the first fruitless move to sink down beside him, she knew that he was dead.

Content

Death Is My Dancing Partner

One The Dancer and the Man

Two Montreal: Le Perroquet

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Three The Excelsior

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Four Buenos Aires: Ta-Ba-Ris

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Five Panama: La Perla Cafe

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